The blue Dolphin Nebula

Bi-colour image of Sh2-308, aka the Dolphin nebula.

This cosmic bubble is created by fast winds from a hot, massive Wolf-Rayet star.

It lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. That corresponds to a diameter of 60 light-years at its estimated distance. The windblown nebula has an age of about 70,000 years.

This image was captured with the ASA500N telescope and FLI PL16803 camera from Telescope Live in El Sauce Observatory, Chile.

Combined my own data from an advanced request with data from a one-click observation...

Total exposure time was 80 minutes: 4 sub-frames of 600s with both H-alpha and OIII filters were used to create this HOO-image. The relatively faint emission captured in this image is dominated by the glow of ionized oxygen atoms (blue hue).

Processing with Astro Pixel Processor, Photoshop CC incl. AstroPanel V4.2, Astronomy Tools and Denoise Projects 3 plug-ins