NGC 7293 - Helix Nebula

From NASA: This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius. Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae. Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores. In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

Image Notes: This is another set of data from TelescopeLive. I had the opportunity to relax and do some image processing over the weekend and since the weather has been extremely poor this year, I’ve been scratching that itch with remote data. While it doesn’t quite match the experience of taking the images yourself, it’s good to keep up with processing in some way. The objective for me here was not to create the perfect image, but to work on getting some detail in the iris and leaving the colors fairly “natural.”