the tulip nebula plus a black hole [View all]

this is the tulip nebula located about 6000 light years away. just above it is a binary system consiting of a very large star and cygnus x-1 the first discovered black hole. the black hole is estimated to only be 300 km or so in diameter but has a mass of 15-20x that of the sun. its companion,the star we can see is about 20 million miles away from the black hole and interactions between it and teh black hole make the system one of the strongest x-ray emiiteres ever discovered.

This is 26 hours of exposure time in my yard over several nights