Back transplant

M57 Ring Nebula in Lyra

Visited the hospital today and have had it confirmed that its my back and not my hip that has caused my present lack of mobility. Am now awaiting a MRI scan before they decide what treatment is best for me. In the meantime I have managed to work out some of the fancy facilities for image processing that are available in the French software IRIS. The above image, which was taken by me last summer, has already featured on my Cabine blog in its enlarged and blurry form. The above image was improved by running a Richardson-Lucy de-convolution algorithm (RL2) and then by adjusting the resultant image in Photoshop. Thought I was dead smart for ten minutes then in a rash moment looked at some of the astro images posted this week on the Stargazers Lounge astronomy forum. In the words of my old friend Paul Chamberlain "Stop fooling yourself Roberts!" or to quote Burgess Meredith "You're a bum Rock".
The Ring Nebula represents the aftermath of a star which having used all its hydrogen in the fusion process that has kept it radiating light for millions of years, has then swollen to become a red giant star (similar to Betelgeuse in Orion as observable now). The star having run out of fuel to sustain pressure against gravity has subsequently collapsed and in the process blown away outer shells of gas and dust just like a smoke ring. The gas glows as it is ionised by radiation from the remnant hot white dwarf star at the centre of the ring. The white dwarf is extremely small, extremely dense and very hot. Eventually the nebula will disappear and the white dwarf will cool and reach equilibrium with interstellar space. The original (progenitor) star would have been very similar in mass and temperature to our sun. This fate therefore awaits our local star "The Sun" but not for a very very long time!

The Trapezium in M42 Orion

This is another image previously published on the blog and now treated to the IRIS and Photoshop treatment. More ionised gas, this time molecular hydrogen being illuminated by the ionising ultra-violet light emanating from the newborn Trapezium stars

Hubble Space Telescope

Pillars of Creation ( Eagle Constellation- Aquila)

The pillars are molecular hydrogen and dust clouds created from past generations of dying stars (nova and supernova).  They provide a stellar nursery where new stars are forming as the gas and dust collapses under the force of gravity.  I saw these clouds through my refracting telescope in the garden last summer when the constellation Altair was relatively high in south.  I created these images from data I downloaded from the Hubble Space Telescope archive.  Thanks to NASA and MAST for the free public access to this wonderful archive of knowledge.

European Southern Observatory

Orion Cluster 

  

Orion Cluster (The Trapezium) as imaged through
 my telescope in the back garden

Quite pleased with myself having found out how to download raw data from the European Southern Observatory. I then used Fits Liberator and Photoshop to create a simple LRGB image of the Orion Nebula. The data is from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) which is  a focal reducer-type camera which is permanently mounted at the Cassegrain focus of the 2.2m MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla.

The Trapezium as seen by one of ESO's large telescopes in Chile

My version from my back garden  -"what it lacks in clarity I more than make up with enthusiasm". You can see four of the Trapezium stars and the  immediate area of the molecular hydrogen cloud illuminated by them.




I created the image below from ESO data selecting a palette of colours that best reflects the muted colour you see through the eyepiece of a telescope.