Friday, 9 January 2009

NGC 1535

I made the most out of the clear sky on Boxing Day, so here is another planetary nebula, in the constellation of Eridanus, NGC 1535. It looks a bit like a small version of the eskimo nebula and no doubt some budding astronomer has tried to name it, but I know it as NGC 1535 now, even though it's just a bunch of letters and numbers. It's got a second star in it, although I'm not sure whether this is a line-of-sight effect or not; surely in a close pair of stars one star can run out of fuel first and release it's atmosphere into space.

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