Kentucky-based astrophotographer David Joyce has shared a glorious deep-space view that reveals fossil light from a vast supernova remnant created in the death throes of a huge star about 10,000 years ago.
Joyce nebula The scene captures the expanding shell of the supernova remnant CTB 1also known as the Garlic Nebula and the Marrow Nebula due to its resemblance to both the bulbous plant and the human brain.
The cataclysmic explosion that generated the supernova remnant simultaneously gave rise to a superdense presswhich was discovered in 2009 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope traveling at 2.5 million miles per hour (4 million km/h) from the place of its birth.
“This was relatively difficult to capture from my light-polluted suburban backyard under the skies of Bortle 7,” Joyce told Space.com in an email. “The Garlic Nebula is quite faint, so I spent more than 50 hours of exposure trying to bring out more details.”
Joyce captured the ancient light of the Marrow Nebula using an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope equipped with a ZWO astronomical camera augmented with a host of peripherals and filters from his home in Lexington, Kentucky, over the course of seven clear September nights earlier this year. The light data was then post-processed using astronomy software to create a spectacular nebula spacescape.
“I’ve wanted to photograph this supernova remnant since I started astrophotography in 2020, but I was never able to frame it correctly with the equipment I had, as its apparent size is so large (almost exactly the size of a full moon) in the sky,” Joyce continued. “After purchasing a new camera a couple of years ago with a larger sensor, I was finally able to frame this object as I had imagined with my 8” telescope to see it up close. “I just had to wait for the right time of year and the conditions that were there last month.”
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