The Tulip nebula with the Cygnus X-1 bow shock

[Francesco Meschia]

Hello SJAA imagers,

I’d like to share an image I just produced of the region around Sharpless 101, also known as the Tulip nebula.

The Tulip nebula is a well-known emission nebula in an H-II region found along the “neck” of the Swan, Cygnus. Nothing too exotic there. However, next to it lies the famous galactic X-ray source Cygnus X-1, which is though to be a binary system formed by the star HD 226868 and a compact companion, most likely a black hole of around 15 solar masses. The matter falling onto the compact object forms an accretion disk, and dissipates its gravitational potential energy in the form of two jets of accelerated particles, traveling at relativistic speeds. One of the jets meets a region of denser interstellar medium, and forms a bow shock that was observed initially in the radio domain, with an optical counterpart observed only recently (~2005, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0701645.pdf).

At optical wavelengths, the shock front glows faintly in H-alpha and mostly in O-III. My goal for this image was to bring it out of the background with good contrast and maybe some detail. I captured 18 hours of SHO narrowband data (using Baader 3.5 and 4 nm filters), to which I added 30 minutes of RGB data just for the sake of nice star colors. I took all the subs from my backyard, starting on June 12th and ending last night (so with a full Moon in between – thanks, narrowband fiters!) through my Astro-Tech 130EDT refractor, reduced to f/5.6. More equipment and acquisition details are available on Astrobin at https://www.astrobin.com/3w563z/.

Comments and critiques are very welcome. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Francesco

[Bruce Braunstein]

Bravo Francesco! Beautiful job as always!

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[Alex Woronow]

Very nice image with strong star colors---way I like 'em. Congrats

Alex

[Gary Hethcoat]

Wow Francesco, very cool!  I would say you accomplished your goals :-)  Thanks for all the background info, very interesting!

Gary

Gary Hethcoat
gary.h...@gmail.com

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[Rashi]

Beautiful!!!

Regards,

--
Rashi G.
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On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 4:15 PM Francesco Meschia <francesc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Dezhi He]

wow so beautiful!

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[Rajah]

Just amazing Francesco. I think you should write a book on Pixinsight processing. Your post processing skill are next level. The tulip looks great, but I also cannot get over how beautiful the stars look. They are not all saturated like my images, each one has a color :)

Great job as always.

On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 4:15 PM Francesco Meschia <francesc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Francesco Meschia]

Thank you, Rajah! The stars are actually from three sets of 10x60s RGB subs. With short exposures you can avoid saturating them.

Francesco

On Jun 23, 2022, at 9:47 PM, Rajah <mcr...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just amazing Francesco. I think you should write a book on Pixinsight processing. Your post processing skill are next level. The tulip looks great, but I also cannot get over how beautiful the stars look. They are not all saturated like my images, each one has a color :)

Great job as always.

On Wed, Jun 22, 2022 at 4:15 PM Francesco Meschia <francesc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello SJAA imagers,

I’d like to share an image I just produced of the region around Sharpless 101, also known as the Tulip nebula.

The Tulip nebula is a well-known emission nebula in an H-II region found along the “neck” of the Swan, Cygnus. Nothing too exotic there. However, next to it lies the famous galactic X-ray source Cygnus X-1, which is though to be a binary system formed by the star HD 226868 and a compact companion, most likely a black hole of around 15 solar masses. The matter falling onto the compact object forms an accretion disk, and dissipates its gravitational potential energy in the form of two jets of accelerated particles, traveling at relativistic speeds. One of the jets meets a region of denser interstellar medium, and forms a bow shock that was observed initially in the radio domain, with an optical counterpart observed only recently (~2005, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0701645.pdf).

At optical wavelengths, the shock front glows faintly in H-alpha and mostly in O-III. My goal for this image was to bring it out of the background with good contrast and maybe some detail. I captured 18 hours of SHO narrowband data (using Baader 3.5 and 4 nm filters), to which I added 30 minutes of RGB data just for the sake of nice star colors. I took all the subs from my backyard, starting on June 12th and ending last night (so with a full Moon in between – thanks, narrowband fiters!) through my Astro-Tech 130EDT refractor, reduced to f/5.6. More equipment and acquisition details are available on Astrobin at https://www.astrobin.com/3w563z/.

Comments and critiques are very welcome. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Francesco

<Tulip-10.jpg>

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[Pranab Dhar]

Francesco,

I will buy if you write one :)

-Pranab

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