NGC 246 Skull Nebula

Capture

Seestar s50 Pro 841 stacks

Date

7 October 2026

Location

Camden, NSW

Original

1628 × 2468 px

NGC 246 Skull Nebula is a planetary nebula in the constellation Cetus, about 1,600 light-years away. The skull-shaped cloud is a glowing shell of gas, 2–3 light-years across, that a dying Sun-like star threw off at the end of its life. The exposed core left behind is tiny but heavy, with about half the Sun’s mass packed into a ball the size of Earth, and it blazes at around 150,000 °C. Its ultraviolet light makes the surrounding gas glow blue-green from oxygen and red from hydrogen. The central star (magnitude 11.8) belongs to a rare triple system. A fainter companion travels with it through space, and in 2014 the Very Large Telescope in Chile found a third star, a faint red dwarf, orbiting that companion. This made NGC 246 one of the first planetary nebulae known to have three stars at its heart. Over the next few tens of thousands of years the shell will spread out and fade, while the star slowly cools into a white dwarf, a dim cinder that will go on cooling for billions of years. Apparent magnitude 10.9.

See it in the nebulas gallery