The Blue Snowball (NGC 7662) - a photo on Flickriver

            This small but surprisingly bright planetary nebula is located in the constellation Andromeda.

I’ve begun a sky survey from my light-polluted home town with a wide-field telescope (e.f.l. 384mm at f/4.8) and this is one of the images I captured last night. I’ve known for a long time that planetary nebulae can have very high surface brightnesses but I was surprised at how easy it was to capture NGC 7662 (also known as the “Blue Snowball”). However, it’s a very tiny object, with an apparent size smaller than the planet Jupiter.

To extract as much detail as possible and to provide an image scale worth viewing I used Bayer drizzle combined with a 2X drizzle during the image integration and finally a 2X resize so what you see here is four times the native image scale of my telescope. This results in a reproduction scale of approximately 0.6 arc seconds per pixel. When I measured the “Snowball” using a pixel scale/ruler in Photoshop the diameter calculated to be 32 arc seconds, which is in good agreement with the published values for NGC 7662. Also, the detail appears to be real as I’ve been able to match-up the gross features with higher resolution images that I’ve found on the internet (although my image is pretty “soft” from the drizzle and rescaling).

I used a series of four-second-long exposures at ISO 1600 to capture this image. The total exposure integration time was four minutes and sixteen seconds (64 subs at 4 seconds each). The telescope was a Stellarvue SV80ST2 and the capture camera was an unmodified Sony NEX-5N. Image processing was done in PixInsight (drizzle, stacking, and preprocessing) and Photoshop CS5.

Given its high surface brightness and small size this should prove to be a good target for my Celestron C9.25 SCT since that scope has over six times the focal length and almost three times the aperture of the setup that I used for the above image.

All rights reserved.

Taken on: September 26, 2014

Tags:

“NGC 7662”

“Blue Snowball Nebula”

“Sony NEX-5N”

Stellarvue

SV80

SV80ST2 « less

Sets appears in: • Stars and Deep Sky Objects

Groups appears in: • Astrophotography - Astronomy - Astrophysics • Astronomy more » • Deep Space Astrophotography • Amateur Astronomy « less

Stats: 3,065 views / 6 comments

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