BAN #445: The art of science, A hidden planetary nebula

18 July 2022 Issue #445

July 18, 2022

Upcoming Appearances/Shameless Self-Promotion

Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about

I recently gave a talk at the Advanced Imaging Conference, a meeting for people who are very very devoted and very very good at astrophotography. These are people who for the most part spend their hard-earned money on complicated and sophisticated equipment, just so they can take beautiful photos of the sky.

Naturally, I support such an effort.

I was invited by my old friend Adam Block, whose name may be familiar if you read the captions to the images I post here and on my blog. We talked about what I should cover, and the obvious topic would be how much I love both the artistry and scientific nature of astronomical images. The talk eventually became, “The Art of Science and Vice-Versa”. In it I discuss the way both art and science work together and, sometimes, against each other, in creating an astrophotograph. But, in the end, with a little discretion and balance, they can both contribute to the awe-inspiring nature of work.

The title slide from my talk. Credit: Phil Plait

And now you can watch it for yourself! The folks at AIC have put all the talks from that weekend, and all you need to do is sign up, which is free.

They recorded the audio from a lapel mic so you can’t hear the loud and continuous guffaws of laughter and thunderous applause as I made jokes and profundities slipped from my mouth, but just assume they’re there. I really enjoyed putting this talk together and presenting it to people who love the sky at least as much as I do.

Addendum: I was scheduled to go to Arkansas this week to, among other things, give a talk for the Arkansas Space Grant Consortium on the April 2024 total solar eclipse that will occur over the US. Unfortunately, a COVID outbreak at a different venue at which I was scheduled to speak forced me to cancel the trip. The eclipse talk has been postponed until November. My apologies to everyone who wanted to come see me talk on Wednesday!

Blog Jam

I wrote “ICYMI” above, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t miss the JWST first release images. Still, here you go. From Tuesday’s article. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

As I mentioned above, I recently gave a talk at the Advanced Imaging Conference, about the art of science, talking about how the two are in many ways the same thing, achieving the same goal — awe and wonder of the Universe — along two different but parallel pathways.

I featured one of my all-time favorite astrophotos: Orion From Head to Toe by Rogelio Bernal Andreo. I mean, seriously:

Orion, as promised. Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

I’ve written about this image on the blog, and as I was putting together my talk I was looking at it again, and thinking about the huge circular nebula around Lambda Orionis, on the left in the image but generally considered Orion’s “head”. I was just poking around the web looking at images of it and stumbled on something I didn’t know anything about…

Mu Orionis is a star not far from Lambda and Betelgeuse. It’s not exactly eye-catching; at 4th magnitude you can barely see it from a mildly light polluted site. But it’s neat. It’s a quadruple star, for one thing, what’s a called a hierarchical quadruple, with two binary star systems orbiting each other.

But it’s also coincidentally very close in the sky to a planetary nebula, the gas thrown off by a star that was once similar to the Sun but is dying. Stars like that turn into a red giant, blow off their outer layers, and then expose their hot dense core, called a white dwarf. Ultraviolet light from the dead star excites the expanding gas, which then glows. They’re one of my favorite kinds of objects in the sky (I studied them for my Master’s and doctoral degrees in fact).

Abell 12 is a great example of one, but it’s not well known or studied because it’s right on top of Mu Ori. Or vice-versa, really, since the star is only about 150 light-years from us while Abell 12 is probably 10 times that far at least. Getting the distances to planetaries is difficult, but its apparent size is small and given they’re usually a light-year or two across it could be as far as 10,000 light-years from us. If it’s actually physically smaller than that it would be closer.

Wanna see? Here it is:

Abell 12, nearly glared out of existence by the much brighter star Mu Ori. Credit: Jerry Macon

Neat! So cool. I found this shot on Astrobin, where a lot of really good astrophotographers post their images, along with details of how they took the shots (which I love; it’s extremely helpful for to know what filters and telescopes they used, and so on). I contacted Jerry Macon, who took it, and he kindly let me use it.

It’s a fairly standard exemplar of its class, a roundish spherical shell of hydrogen and oxygen, glowing red and blue, respectively. I did a Crash Course Astronomy episode on planetary nebulae, which will give you an idea of how all that works:

I still love seeing them through the eyepiece, even though most are faint and difficult to see. When I was a kid they weren’t studied much; photographs of them tended to overexpose the bright parts and hide the faint bits, so it was hard to study them. Digital cameras came along and suddenly we could see all sorts of details in them that showed us they are fantastic, complex, and seemingly fragile structures with amazing and complicated physics going on. I’ve written about them here on BAN as well as on the blog. Many, many times.

If you want to see more, Macon has 60 other planetaries he’s imaged on Astrobin, so take a look at those beauties. And I thank him for letting me use his super cool and lovaly shot of the hidden gem of Abell 12.

Et alia

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