The Skull Nebula, in Time for Halloween

[Russ.Carpenter]

Here is the infamous Skull Nebula, AKA the Pac-Man nebula. about 1,600 light years from Earth. The central star is a white dwarf. I snagged the image on a 27inch Planewave, located at iTelescope in Siding Springs, Australia. 1.2 hours of imaging time, divided equally among R, G and B, binned 1X1. The subs were stacked and aligned in PixInsight, everything else was in StarTools, except for a tiny bit of cleanup in my new favorite general purpose processing program, Affinity Photo.

RGB2.jpg (230.5 KiB) Viewed 5347 times

[admin]

Rotate it ~ 80degs clock wise and the skull is looking at you straight - wonderful image!

[Russ.Carpenter]

Of course! Check out this more ghoulish version.

RGB2 Rotated.jpg (405.82 KiB) Viewed 5331 times

[admin]

Perfect!
Sometimes it's a mystery to me why objects are named the way they are, but I love it when someone nails it - like you did here - and you can clearly see where people were getting at when they came up with the name.

[Hondo]

Nice work. The Pacman Nebula is actually NGC 281.