Archive for Roger Wesson

Two Views of the Ring Nebula

Posted in Cardiff, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on August 22, 2023 by telescoper

It’s very nice to have an opportunity, courtesy of JWST, to congratulate astronomers from my current institution (Maynooth, Ireland) and my previous one (Cardiff, UK) – as well as many others – or their involvement in stunning new observations of the Ring Nebula (aka M57 and NGC 6720), a planetary nebula. There is a full story on the Maynooth University website here detailing the involvement of Dr Patrick Kavanagh in the processing of the images and another on the Cardiff University website here about Dr Roger Wesson, who led the programme. Not surprisingly there has been a lot of news coverage about these wonderful images obtained with the NIRCam and MIRI instruments on JWST here in Ireland and in Wales and elsewhere.

A particular excuse for reproducing the pictures here is to try out the fancy “image comparison” tool on WordPress, which allows the reader – that’s you – to slide one picture over the other. Have a go!

This groovy visual shows two images side by side of the Ring Nebula. The image on the left shows the NIRCam view and the image on the right shows the MIRI image. The left image shows the planetary nebula as a distorted doughnut with a rainbow of colours with a blue/green inner cavity and clear filamentary structure in the inner region. The right image shows the nebula with a red/orange central cavity with a ring structure that transitions from colours of yellow to purple/blue. Picture credits ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow, N. Cox, R. Wesson

The full paper describing these observations can be found on the arXiv here.

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