This image by Chris Schur of the M78 region inspired Steve Cullen to create a time-lapse video about a small area in the region known as McNeil's Nebula. Click on the image to go to the video. Chris Schur photo
Seeing Chris Schur’s M78 as the picture of the day on Astronomy.com got me thinking about McNeil’s Nebula. I wondered how its brightness had changed since I hadn’t heard much about it recently. So I went online and gathered various images of M78 and McNeil’s Nebula going back to 2005. I aligned them all in Photoshop and then created a short time-lapse movie of six of the images (two from 2005, one from 2008, one from 2009, and two from 2010). The one from February 2010 was taken by Mark Hanson using LightBuckets. I’ve included the video.
I’m not 100 percent certain that the changes in brightness shown in the video are real or if they are due to different image processing techniques, but the shots were all done by people fairly skilled at astrophotography. I tend to believe that the images are accurate also because the luminosity of nearby stars and M78 is relatively constant from frame to frame. Overall, I think it is an interesting video that seems to illustrate the variability in McNeil’s Nebula due to V1647 Ori.
Steve, thanks for taking the time to do this. It demonstrates how the so-called unchanging sky really can change on a timescale humans can understand.
To learn even more about McNeil’s Nebula, check out “How an amateur astronomer changed stellar astrophysics” by Adam Frank in our November 2009 issue.