SAS Astronomy Picture of the Month [November, 2023]
NGC7635 - Bubble Nebula in Cassiopeia
A beautiful image taken by one of our SAS members, Sergey Yagoda using a ZWO ASI2600mc cooled camera on his 9.25″ Celestron SCT and Celestron CGEM II mount. The exposure is about 8.5h consisting of 30 x 1000s images. It was taken in June of 2020, so it isn’t exactly a current image for the picture of the month, but being in Cassiopeia currently right above your head in the sky, I thought we could make it work!
The Bubble Nebula is actually the smallest of three bubbles created by the stellar wind surrounding the massive hot, 8.7 magnitude young central star BD+602522. The nebula is near a giant molecular cloud which contains the expansion of the bubble nebula while itself being excited by the hot central star, causing it to glow. It is somewhere between 7000 and 11000 light years from earth and the bubble is about 3-5 light years in diameter.
Photo by Sergey Yagoda