Good morning. It’s November 10, and today’s photo reveals a faint supernova.
Also known as CTB-1, this celestial object was initially mistaken for a planetary nebula in the 1950s. However, it has since been identified as the remnants of a supernova that occurred approximately 10,000 years ago and is affectionately referred to as the “Garlic Nebula.” The name is quite fitting, given its appearance. This nebula is notoriously difficult to photograph, making today’s submission from Ken Bates all the more remarkable.
Bates shared, “It is an extremely faint object, and without narrowband filters, it’s almost impossible to photograph. Narrowband filters capture specific wavelengths of light. Narrowband images often result in magenta stars, which I personally don’t favor, so I took additional exposures for about 2.5 hours using RGB filters. I removed the stars from the narrowband image, then extracted and color-calibrated them using data from the GAIA satellite database, and merged the color-calibrated stars into the narrowband image to achieve this result.”
The image itself required approximately 51.5 hours of total exposure time taken over a two-week period in late September and early October. Bates captured the Garlic Nebula from his driveway in the Black Forest north of Colorado Springs.
Source: Ken Bates.
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