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These are the intricate filaments of
faint supernova
remnant Simeis 147. Seen towards the constellation Taurus
it covers nearly 3 degrees (6 full moons) on the sky corresponding to a
width of 160 light-years at the stellar debris cloud's estimated
distance of 3,000 light-years. It is one of the faintest objects in the
sky, discovered using a 25" Schmidt camera in 1952 by G.A Shajn and
V.E. Hase at the Crimean Astrophyical Observatory at Simeis (in the
former U.S.S.R). It was also imaged independently at Palomar by the
48" "Samuel Oschin" Schmidt camera on red photographic
plates at roughly the same time period. This image has been chosen as NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for November 29, 2005.
This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey. In order to produce the color image seen
here, I worked with a total of 66 different
frames, 33 for each color band, coming from 8 different plates taken
between 1988 and 1997.
Original file is 17,067x13,508 pixels with a resolution of about 1
arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large 4.7° x 3.8° (for
comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter). Other images of the same celestial field found online
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