NGC 6153 Planetary Nebula in Scorpius

This Planetary Nebula named NGC 6153 is located about 4000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius.
It is a planetary nebula that is elliptical in shape, with an extremely rich network of loops and filaments.
The whole nebula in the center of this image shows what remains of a star like the Sun after it has depleted most of its fuel.
When this happens, the outer layers of the star are ejected, and get excited and ionized by the energetic ultraviolet light emitted by the bright hot core of the star, forming the nebula.
Additional concentric faint outer rings can be observed, showing some evolution of the forming nebula.
The bright but rarely imaged nebula spans just 32 by 25 arc-sec, a faint halo extends to about 1 arc-min in diameter.

The outer halo around this planetary nebula was discovered by the Galactic Planetary Nebula Halo Survey (GPNHS) team in February 2015.

A Hubble image can be found here.

Image data:
HaO3RGB (320-200-180-100-100 min) total 15 h, north is up, seeing 0.8-1.3 arc-sec
80cm f/7 Astrooptik Keller cassegrain, FLI PL-16803, Astrodon gen2 filters, Prompt 7 CTIO Chile

Processing: Johannes Schedler

Find here a cropped image in 100/200% size below.

 click for 200% size

Last modified on Saturday, 28 November 2020 10:58

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