WR-102
This rarely imaged… thing… is the mess left behind by the hottest star in our galaxy: WR-102, one of only four known Oxygen-sequence Wolf-Rayet stars in the Milky Way. It’s already burning Helium – maybe even past that point – and is about to go supernova.
It’s located within the rich starfield of Sagittarius, looking into the heart of our galaxy, which made processing a little tricky. There are so many stars around here that they blend together into what looks like a nebula, and I really had to knock them down to showcase the gas blown off by this star instead.
Explore the full-sized, wider image for lots of interesting chunks of red Hydrogen. Many are distant planetary nebulas – other stars that are blowing out what’s left of them, like our own sun will in a few billion years. I was hoping I had discovered a new one in there, but alas – although some are recent discoveries that have not yet been confirmed as planetary nebulas, I’m not the first to notice them.
This is an “HOO” image for those gases, with Hydrogen emissions mapped to red, and Oxygen to blue and green. The stars – what I left of them – are natural RGB colors.
