Just a tiny snippet of the Vela SNR. The bright bits are easy, but here we've tried to show some of the super-faint pre-existing material into which the SNR has expanded, and what is happening there. Total of 24 hours in 1 hour subs. Red: SII (9hrs), Green: H-alpha (9hrs), Blue: OIII (7hrs). Sadly courtesy of weather, most of the subs were taken under a waxing gibbous moon, so the background is a bit grittier than we'd like. On the other hand, seeing and transparency were good for high summer.
Big raw image here.
Trying to mend our rotten ways and give more emphasis to the red SII channel, without departing
too far from our desire to avoid the blood-and-intestines magenta excesses of natural colour. We'd prefer the true Australian colours of green fields, golden wheat, and blue sky.
We can now see more detail in the yellow dragon's head, facing left, and breathing multi-coloured flames, just above the brightest whitest part of the pencil. If you look at the one-to-one image, you will see that the dragon has scales, even over the dark reptilian eye.
The ESO 2.2 metre image shows that the scales are where they should be.
Notice that the Pencil seems to be in a clear space, a horizontal dark band across the central third of the image, whereas there is much smooth background H-alpha and some SII nebulosity, presumably pre-SNR material, in the upper and lower thirds of the image.
At top right, we see something different: multiple tangled shock fronts, showing predominantly in H-alpha, forming a rough sphere, and just plausibly part of a separate explosive event.
Field 30' arc, north on the left. Aspen 16M on 20" PlaneWave.
Very best,
Mike n Trish
