The Night Sky: Witch's Broom

Halloween stargazers,
    Attached is an image of the Witch’s Broom Nebula taken at the Mary Aloysia Hardey Observatory at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Nebulae are often named after objects they resemble; in this case the nebula resembles a broom. Located 1400 light years away in the constellation Cygnus the swan, the Witch’s Broom is very dim and must be viewed in a large telescope.

NOTE: The Bowman Observatory is open on clear second and fourth Tuesday nights.

The Witch’s Broom formed when a massive star violently blew apart in a Supernova. The material from the supernova explosion is expanding through space at high speed. When it collides with interstellar gas at rest it gets heated to millions of degrees, making the Witch’s Broom visible to us. The star that formed the Witch’s Broom exploded 15,000 years ago. Ancient people that witnessed this supernova would have seen an extremely bright ‘new star’ in our sky. We can only wonder what they thought when they witnessed that cosmic spectacle.       

Supernovae create elements heavier than iron. We owe our existence to untold supernovae in the distant past that seeded our solar system with the ingredients necessary for life and a modern civilization. We would not have iron in our blood, gold rings on our fingers or uranium in our nuclear power plants if not for past supernovae.

The image is a 25 stack of 3 minute sub exposures taken through a TeleVue 76mm refractor with a Canon 60Da camera. The data was processed in Deep Sky Stacker software and PhotoshopCS6.