NGC 7635 – Bubble Nebula in the Foraxx Palette

The Bubble Nebula is one of the most intriguing objects in the sky. Seven light years across, it’s powered by a star 45 times more massive than the sun. For those keeping score at home, it’s the Wolf-Rayet star BD +60°2522. The energy it produces slams into the interstellar gas around it at four-million miles per hour, creating the bubble effect.

The Bubble is about 7,100 light years away from Earth. In four to ten million years, the off-center star energizing it will blow itself apart in a Type II supernova explosion.

As a fun exercise, I cropped and rotated the image to match the 26th Anniversary Hubble Space Telescope image of the Bubble. You can compare my effort below (on the left), with the Hubble image (right). Note that my image cost just a bit less than the $16 billion the Hubble Space Telescope has cost American taxpayers to date.

Note that I processed this image in what we call the “Foraxx” palette—a dynamic color palette developed by astrophotographers for astrophotographers to help expose more of the chemistry going on in objects like this.

See below for a link to an image relying on the same data, but processed in the Hubble Palette—a color palette developed by Hubble Space Telescope team, and one that is very popular among astrophotographers.