Butterfly Nebula NGC6302
by Ram Vasudev
Title
Butterfly Nebula NGC6302
Artist
Ram Vasudev
Medium
Photograph
Description
This is a significantly modified image of the Butterfly Nebula (catalogued as NGC 6302), captured by NASA’s Hubble telescope. I have modified the original raw NASA image considerably to enhance the colors, beauty, balance and luminosity, in order to provide you a breathtaking, high quality, fine art print through this website. The original NASA raw capture is in public domain and was recently captured by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) installed by NASA astronauts back in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the Hubble telescope.
NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star's outer layer, expelled over about 2,200 years.
For this image, Hubble was recently tasked to observe it across a complete spectrum of light, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, to help us better understand the mechanics at work in the technicolor "wings" of gas. The observations highlight a new pattern of near-infrared emission from singly ionized iron (Fe+), which traces an S shape from lower left to upper right in the image. This emission likely traces the central star system’s most recent ejections of gas, which are moving at much faster speeds than the previously expelled mass.
The stars at its center are responsible for the nebula's appearance. In their death throes, they have cast off layers of gas periodically over the past couple thousand years. The "wings" of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are speeding across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour.
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October 21st, 2022
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