Thursday, March 27, 2008

APOD 4.1


This weeks APOD is a reprocessed picture of the Cat's Eye Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Craft. It is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Draco. Structurally, it is one of the most complex nebulae known, with observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope revealing remarkable structures such as knots, jets and sinewy arc-like features. It is a sun like planet and scientiists believe our sun to follow the same phases in about 5 billion years. It was discovered by William Herschel on February 15, 1786, and was the first planetary nebula whose spectrum was investigated by the English amateur astronomer William Huggins in 1864. The intricacy of the structure may be caused in part by material ejected from a binary central star, but as yet, there is no direct evidence that the central star has a companion. The remake image focuses on sharpening the visiblility of details in light and dark areas of the nebula.

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