New Images of the Bubble Nebula and Barnard 163 from Kitt Peak (Forwarded)

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Office of Public Affairs and Educational Outreach
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Sunday, January 7, 2007

RELEASE NO: NOAO 07-02

New Images of the Bubble Nebula and Barnard 163 from Kitt Peak

The ghostly blue Bubble Nebula and a swan-like dark nebula known as Barnard
163 are featured in beautiful new images taken in 2006 using the Mayall
4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The newly released
images are displayed in large format at the NOAO exhibit booth starting
today in Seattle at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is one of three shells of gas surrounding the
massive star BD+602522, the bright star near the center of the bubble.
Energetic radiation from the star ionizes the shell, causing it to glow.
About six light-years in diameter, the Bubble Nebula is located in the
direction of the constellation Cassiopeia. The magenta wisps near the
bottom-right of the image are an unexpected bonus -- the wisps are the
remnants of a supernova that exploded thousands of years ago. This is the
first optical image of the supernova remnant, which was discovered at radio
wavelengths by the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey in 2005.

Barnard 163 is a dark nebula within IC 1396, a very large emission nebula
complex in the constellation Cepheus. This interstellar cloud was discovered
by Edward Emerson (E. E.) Barnard (1857-1923), an American astronomer and
pioneer of astrophotography who began as an amateur comet hunter, earned a
degree in mathematics and later worked at Lick Observatory and the
University of Chicago. He is also the namesake of Barnards star, the second
closest known star system to Earth.

A third image from the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope taken in 2006 and featured
at the NOAO exhibit booth at the AAS meeting, a bright reflection nebula in
Orion known as M78, was released earlier this year.

All three of the images were taken using the 64-megapixel Mosaic-1 digital
imager on the Mayall 4-meter telescope by Travis A. Rector of the University
of Alaska Anchorage and Heidi Schweiker of the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona.

"These images show the quality of observations, the high resolution and the
wide field of view that the Mosaic-1 camera regularly achieves on the Mayall
telescope," says Rector. "It is a joy to work with the excellent data that
the Mosaic cameras produce, both at Kitt Peak and on the Blanco 4-meter
telescope in Chile."

Links to the two new images are available at
http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im1029.html
and
http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im1030.html

The image of M78 is available from the NOAO Image Gallery,
http://www.noao.edu/image_gallery/html/im1013.html

All images credit: T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage, H. Schweiker
and NOAO/AURA/NSF

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory, based in Tucson, Arizona,
includes Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the NOAO Gemini Science Center. It
is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy
Inc. (AURA), under a cooperative agreement with the National Science
Foundation.