NGC 6302: The Butterfly Nebula

The unparalleled clusters and nebulae of planet Earth’s evening sky are on the total given the names of flowers or insects, and its whopping 3 gentle-one year wingspan, NGC 6302 is now not any exception. With an estimated flooring temperature of about 250,000 degrees C, the central celebrity of the planetary nebula is reworking into a white dwarf celebrity, changing into exceptionally sizzling, and bright brightly in ultraviolet gentle. The central celebrity is hidden from state gape by a torus of mud, but its titillating ultraviolet gentle ionizes atoms in the nebula. In this bright, telescopic gape restful with narrowband image recordsdata, the ionized hydrogen and doubly ionized oxygen atoms are shown of their characteristic pink and blue-green hues to cowl an beautiful complicated of knots and filaments all the draw in which thru the nebula’s cruise-fancy bipolar outflows. NGC 6302 lies about 4,000 gentle-years away in the arachnologically correct constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius).