Having recently seen the wonderful Mars Global Surveyor image of "Happy Face" crater, you can imagine my surprise at catching a further smiley face, that of the Eskimo nebula beaming out at me at this recent image I took of NGC 2392. The face was not apparent on the original 4x40 sec exposure (top left), and only came to light when I applied ten iterations of the Lucy-Richardson algorithm (QMips-32 image processing software) (bottom right). No, I can assure you that this is not a faked image - even though the smiley face looks far too perfect!
The nebula was first discovered by William Herschel in 1787 who described it as "a ninth magnitude star exactly in the centre of a round bright atmosphere equally dispersed all around". We now know that the radiation from the bright central star results in the fluorescent glow of the nebulosity - caused by the spectral lines of doubly ionized oxygen. This star probably went nova 1700 years ago making it one of the youngest planetary nebulae known. The diameter of the outer ring is 0.6 light years and the nebula lies at a distance of 3000 light years away from us.
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