Blip… there goes another star.

I remember being shown this amazing object for the first time in a new 12 inch Dobsonian at Norwich Astronomy Society by a guy who knew his way around the sky and had just hunted this thing down. There was quite a queue after quite a quirky astronomical quest. This object lies in the constellation of Cassiopeia - the Queen of Ethiopia, and you would think it easy to find: "just past the ‘W’ shape, to 4 Cas, then across a bit, past the cluster M52"… but I can never find the damn thing by star-hopping. On this occasion I had the luxury of a computer, which takes the challenge out of it, but my sky knowledge is useful every time there is a system error. With autoguiding on the star in the frame above, the position of this object in the sky allowed 1 minute exposures before too much rotation occurred. A few of these later, I revealed the blue bubble cast out by the star’s stellar wind, set against the surrounding interstellar redglowing hydrogen. There is also the strange, pinkish bar close by the central star, which is itself offset slightly from the centre of the bubble. It looks like this enraged star is hurtling along while blasting away 10 light years of space around it (that’s a 30 million million mile radius) with its fierce radiation.