It is always interesting when two different kinds of objects
can be seen within the same narrow field of view.

M 52 is the large, open cluster near the bottom of this image. The interstellar
dust between us and M 52 makes its distance difficult to determine, but it
is probably about 5000 light years away, and thus about 19 light years in
diameter. It is located in the constellation Cassiopeia.

At the upper left of the image is The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The bright star
within the bubble is a rare variety: a Wolf-Rayet star, a giant (this one
is about 40x the mass of the sun) that burns hot, sheds a lot of material into
space, and will eventually end in a supernova. The material cast off by this
star plows into the thin interstellar gas, and piles it up in a denser ridge
(think about a snow plow piling up the snow). The radiation from the star ionizes
this denser gas, which then glows faintly red. In this case, the material has formed
a spherical bubble around the star. The bubble is 7 light years in
diameter, and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour. The Bubble nebula
is 7100 light years away from earth.

Image data:
Camera: Canon 350 XT (modified)
Exposure: ISO 1600, 1 minute x 78
Telescope: 10" Schmidt-Newtonian