Astr110 Photography Projects, Fall 2004

Blue Snowball, Mike Boss & Ryan Charles

The Blue Snowball is a planetary nebula. These classes of objects were once 'normal' stars who went through a loss of nuclear reactions in the core, causing all expulsion of the outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf star in the middle. It's estimated that 95% of all stars in the main sequence will end their lives this way. NGC 7662 (Blue Snowball) is approximately 2,200 light years away from the Sun, in the Andromeda Constellation. The apparent diameter of the Blue Snowball is 32"x28", which equals out to approximately two light years across.

In the image itself, you can see that the cloud is round because of the expulsion of the outer rings at a similar rate. A 16" OGS Telescope was used to take this image with an exposure time of 300 seconds. We only ended up using a blue filter to capture our image, which is why the other two stars in our image appear to have a blue tint to them also.

References:
http://www.astroimages.org/ccd/ngc7662.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap961121.html
http://www.astro.washington.edu/balick/wfpc2/n7662.caption.html