SH2-101, is an emission nebula located in the constellation Cygnus. I have added an image of the wider view because it contains some really awesome stuff. Read one! The bright red nebula in the image is sometimes called the Tulip Nebula because it appears to resemble the outline of a tulip when imaged photographically, and is another nebula, like the Iris Nebula, that is looks like a flower in the sky. Sh 2-101, at least in the field seen from Earth, is in close proximity to micro-quasar Cygnus X-1, site of one of the first suspected black holes. The Cygnus X-1 is located about 15′ minutes west of Sh 2-101, in the upper left portion of wide image. The companion star of Cygnus X-1 is a spectral class supergiant with a mass of 21 solar masses and 20 times the radius of the Sun. This companion star of is the brighter of the two “twin” stars in the upper left quadrant of the wider image. The black hole has a mass of 15 solar masses and a radius of only 45 km. The white wisp in the upper left corner of the wide view is created by a jet of energized particles from the black hole as they interact with the interstellar medium. I’ve provided the square “Facebook friendly” smaller image rotated so the tulip is more apparent.
Distance:
SH2-101 lies at a distance of about 6,000 light-years (35.28 quadrillion miles) from Earth.
Imaging
On an unusually clear night last night, the smoke and clouds cleared and I took 87 shots at 300 seconds each (7+hours). I calibrated these with I calibrated with 20 biases, 20 darks, 20 flats, and 20 dark flats. I used Siril to stack the image, the Graxpert script to perform the background extraction and gradient reduction, and the arcsinh script to stretch the image. I used Siril to add color contrast to the stars, then finished off the image in Photoshop. I’ll continue working on an HOO image.
