The Jelly Fish Nebula, IC 443

 The Jelly Fish Nebula IC 443  Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this telescopic mosaic. The scene is anchored below by bright star Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twin in the Gemini constellation, while the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with tentacles dangling below and left of center. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC443,the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbour a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper right. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this narrowband composite image presented in the Hubble Palette would be about 300 light-years across.This image is a composite of an image taken by the 6 ” Takahashi FS152 with a focal reducer and an image of the JellyFish itself taken with the Planewave 20″ CDK20. The total image has 184 sub images taken over 32 hours.