A famous planetary nebula in the Northern Hemisphere of the sky in the summer constellation of Lyra. One of four planetary nebulae in the Messier catalog of deep sky objects, the other three being M27, M76 and M97. It is visible in a small telescope as a faint ring. M57 is about 2500 light years away and it is the outer envelope shed off by a dying star, the star itself can be seen right in the middle of the nebula. The Sun will look like this from afar when it does the same in about five billion years from now. More massive stars do not die in this fashion but explode in a cataclysmic event called a supernova; M1 being one such example.
In the image below, look for the ghostly outer ring surrounding the main “ring” of the nebula.
Image Technical Data
Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK with my TEC 140 refractor and Atik 460 cooled CCD camera over three nights in August 2018 with Astrodon LRGBHa filters. mounted on MESU 200 and guided with OAG.
Everything binned 1×1
Lum > 13 x 600s ; Red > 12 x 300s ; Green 12 x 300s ; Blue > 12 x 300s ; Ha > 12 x 300s
Total integration > 6 hours )just over)
Captured with Sequence Generator Pro and processed with PixInsight and Photoshop CC.
Comments are closed.