NGC 6751 Glowing Eye Nebula

Gemini South image of planetary nebula NGC 6751, the "Glowing Eye Nebula." The image is the result of the winning entry in the 2009 Gemini School Astronomy Contest, submitted by high school student Daniel Tran of PAL College, Cabramatta, NSW, Australia. Using narrow-band filters in the imaging mode of the Gemini Multi-object Spectrograph (GMOS), the locations of hydrogen, ionized sulfur, and doubly-ionized oxygen are color-coded in the image as yellow, red, and blue, respectively. The 3,000-year-old Glowing Eye Nebula is located about 7,000 light years from Earth and the bright inner portion of the nebula has a diameter of about 0.8 light years. In addition to the emission of the nebula, other wisps of gas in the interstellar medium (upper-left-hand corner of the image) are being ionized by the nebula's central star, which has a temperature of over 100,000 degrees Celsius.