You think you know someone and then you look at them in infrared and then wonder what else they aren't showing you. Seriously, I have seen
this picture of the same object at least a dozen times in the past so I didn't expect anything out of the ordinary when I looked at the data in the archive. But there are a whole bunch of infrared observations where these weird, geometric arcs or ovals show up! Fascinating. Note they are a bit blurry as data from NICMOS tends to be. Sometimes I wonder if all the processing I do to its data is right or not but there really are some interesting things there even though it's so messy.
Upon further inspection of the nebula I get a good sense of its dimensionality and to me it appears that we are looking down at an hourglass from a 45° angle or so. I think this is why processing is so addictive. I stare at things for a long time and come away with a much better understanding than I previously had and maybe even some extra information that wasn't in a press release at some point.
Oh, I got rid of the large, distracting diffraction spikes as best I could while doing the least harm to the object that I could manage.
Red: HST_11331_03_NIC_NIC3_F160W_sci + hst_11093_01_wfpc2_f675w_pc_sci + hst_11093_01_wfpc2_f658n_pc_sci
Green: hst_11093_01_wfpc2_f656n_pc_sci + hst_11093_01_wfpc2_f555w_pc_sci
Blue: hst_11093_01_wfpc2_f502n_pc_sci + hst_06353_08_wfpc2_f487n_pc_sci
North is up.
