Hourglass Nebula
Sign in to saveplanetary nebula in the constellation Musca
In the Vinony graph
Vinony's link graph records 126 inbound references to Hourglass Nebula, and connects out to Musca, epoch and IC 2944.
It sits within the topics ESO objects, Musca and Planetary nebulae.
Vinony links it to 29 Wikipedia language editions.
Key facts
- Right ascension
- 13 39 35.116
- Declination
- −67 ° 22 ′ 51.45 ″
- Distance
- 8,000 ly
- Constellation
- Musca
- Radius
- 0.29 ly
- Notable features
- Resembles a human eye
- Designations
- ESO 97-1, Engraved Hourglass Nebula, Etched Hourglass Nebula, PN MyCn 18 , RCW 77
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- H II region
- Named after
- hourglass
- Constellation
- Musca
- Distance from Earth
- 3165
- Image
- MyCn18-crop.png
Show 11 more facts
- right ascension
- 204.89606704339500
- declination
- -67.38104404894420
- parallax
- 0.9681
- catalog code
- DENIS J133935.0-672251
- discoverer or inventor
- Annie Jump Cannonn
- apparent magnitude
- 10.808
- epoch
- J2000.0
- radial velocity
- -67.8
- right ascension component of proper motion
- -5.675
- declination component of proper motion
- -0.718
- Commons category
- MyCn 18
Sources (1)
via Wikidata · CC0
~1 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Engraved Hourglass Nebula (also known as MyCn 18) is a young planetary nebula in the southern constellation Musca. It was discovered by Annie Jump Cannon and Margaret W. Mayall during their work on an extended Henry Draper Catalogue (the catalogue was built between 1918 and 1924). At the time, it was designated simply as a small faint planetary nebula. Much improved telescopes and imaging techniques allowed the hourglass shape of the nebula to be discovered by Romano Coradi and Hugo Schwarz in images taken during 1991–1992 at the European Southern Observatory. It is conjectured that MyCn 18's hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud which is denser near its equator than its poles. The vivid colours given off by the nebula are the result of different 'shells' of elements being expelled from the dying star, in this case helium, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon. The central star of the nebula has a strong magnetic field.
The Hourglass Nebula was photographed by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Hourglass Nebula” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.