File:Campbell's Star.jpg

Edit 2013 Dec 09: Thinking more about this, I have decided that I am confused. This is a Wolf-Rayet central star with a planetary nebula, but the star is less massive than other classes of Wolf-Rayet stars. Massive stars have ejecta shells around them rather than planetary nebulas. However, it looks strange to me. Not necessarily just a planetary nebula. Could this be some kind of combination of ejecta shell plus planetary nebula? Anyway, I don't know quite what I am talking about here. After processing so many images of planetary nebulas I have ended up reading and learning far more than I ever thought I would but I can hardly claim to be educated on the matter.

Campbell's star is another Wolf-Rayet star with a nebula surrounding it. Conveniently, ESA published an article about it on the same day I decided to process this and you can read about it <a href="http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1337a/" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

By coincidence I was rummaging through the HLA and decided I wanted to do this object but then realized I had just been looking at that ESA release maybe an hour earlier without realizing I was looking at the same thing. Processing sure makes a difference in how things can appear. It just looks like an oval without much detail in the HLA previews.

I feel like a bit of a cheater because once someone else has taken a shot at it, it becomes a lot easier to find little things you'd like to fine tune beyond what your predecessor did. I probably wouldn't have pushed it as far as I could go without an example to work with.

One thing I did notice without any help was that there were some interesting structures visible only in some NICMOS data, here appearing as the most red areas. What do your near-infrared eyes see, NICMOS?

The list of data is awkward. All of these were from WFPC2 PC except for the f212n filter. The blue channel is just a quick median stack without much else while the red and green channels received special care.

Red: NICMOS f212n+f953n+f673n+f658n Green: f656n+f631n Blue: f588n+f502n+f487n+f375n