Tulip Nebula

[Bill Richards]

The Tulip Nebula (aka SH2-101) is an emission nebula about 6000 light-years from Earth. It's close to microquasar Cygnus X-1, one of the first suspected black holes. Cygnus X-1 is orbited by a blue supergiant star (21 times as massive as our sun) which feeds a spinning accretion disk around the black hole, resulting in jets of high energy particles being emitted perpendicular to the accretion disk (see 2nd image, courtesy of NASA). One of these jets is impacting a denser region of the interstellar medium forming a glowing curved bow shock (shock front) which can be seen as faint bluish arc in this image (see 3rd image for annotations).

This is the result of over 12 hours of exposure time taken on 2025-06-25 and 2025-06-28.

Equipment and Software:
=======================
Mount: 10Micron GM1000HPS w/PoleMaster
Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 8 w/0.7x focal reducer
Auto-Focuser: Rigel Systems nFOCUS
Imaging Camera: ASI2600MC-Pro
Filter: Astro Hutech NBZ dual-band
Guide Camera: ASI174MM-Mini on OAG
Imaging S/W: NINA
Guiding S/W: PHD2
Image Processing S/W: PixInsight

Exposure Details:
=================
Camera Temperature -15C
Bias: 50
Gain: 100
146 x 300s
Plus 32x Darks, Flats, and Dark Flats

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[AlanLichty]

I feel like I just learned something new That's a mind boggling area of space!

 

[JimFox]

I also learned something today, thanks Bill for the education!

And I love your image, it really looks great.

 

[Mike Lewis]

Bill,

Tremendous work. ALWAYS fun to see the amazing images with the super entertaining and informative write-ups.

ML