Egg Nebula (2013)

A couple of days I was yearning to see a closer version of the Cotton Candy Nebula and I think this image comes pretty close. It’s a completely different object but they seem very similar!

I had a bit of fun with it. There was enough data from three different proposals to combine into a pretty high resolution view of the object without using the polarized light data which results in a rainbow of representative colors.

There’s infrared represented by red so we can see the very thick dust wrapping around the nucleus and two optical wideband filters for the green and blue channels. So it’s sort of natural colors.

Note that only one channel of data is present for some parts of the image especially at the corners, which affects the stars. The Egg itself is almost completely covered by all three channels.

This view is zoomed 64.94% from actual pixels.

Red: hst_11580_05_wfc3_ir_f110w (a stack of exposures 01-05 omitting 03)
Green: hst_07423_a1_wfpc2_f606w_wf_sci + j8gh55plq_drz + j8gh55pnq_drz (all f606w filters)
Blue: hst_07423_a1_wfpc2_f380w_wf_sci

North is up

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.