WR 134 is a Wolf-Rayet bubble similar to the Crescent Nebula. Unlike the Crescent which has a fairly clearly defined shell, much of the shell for this bubble appears faint except at the top right of the bubble. In many images only the top right part of the bubble is shown but fortunately the OIII master showed the complete bubble.

I decided to see how much of that bubble I could show and it was a challenge because of the faintness. However with a few processing techniques I was able to show most of what was there and reduce most of what shouldn’t be there.

The star at the center of this bubble is 6,000 light years away in Cygnus. WR 134 was one of the first three Wolf-Rayet stars discovered back in 1887. The star is five times the radius of our sun but 400,000 times as luminous. This is one of those stars that is going to live hard, die young and leave a good looking corpse (the supernova remnant). In the meantime It’s putting off a lot of ultraviolet radiation that is lighting up the shells of gas from its own solar wind. The nebula itself is about the apparent size of the full moon or at least the OIII part of he shell is by my estimate.

This is 31h 45m of HOO data with RGB stars. For all the technical details, see astrobin. The AAPOD2 folks selected this as their image of the day for 16 August 2023. You can find it at here.