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Writer's pictureCalvin Klatt

Recent Observations: Bubble Nebula

Updated: Nov 11, 2021



I think this is a really spectacular image of NGC7635, the Bubble Nebula. It was captured on October 6, 2021 at the Lac Teeples Deep Sky Observatory.


The bubble we see is the result of radiation and outflows from a bright and massive star (44 times more massive than the Sun) that lies inside a relatively dense molecular cloud. The star has blown the neighboring gasses away from itself, and the radiation is blasting the shell of matter causing it to reflect light and emit radiation (as an H-II region).


From Earth the bubble and glowing region around it appears as approximately 15 minutes of arc (arcmin) by 8 minutes of arc. It's roughly 10,000 light years away from us.


The actual bubble is believed to be approximately 4 light years in diameter. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is also just over 4 light years away. The diameter of our solar system is roughly one-thousandth as big as a light year. So that bubble is 4 thousand times the diameter of our solar system (out to Neptune or so). Quite a bubble!


I've taken a few images of this "bubble". It is relatively bright so it is easy to image, but the fine filamentary features are not quite so easy to capture. This particular image is my best one so far.



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