Planetary Nebulae

M97 – The Owl Nebula TEC 140

M97 The Owl Nebula
The Owl Nebula

The Owl Nebula is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Ursa Major, one of three planetary nebulae in the Messier catalogue.  It is visible as a faint smudge in amateur telescopes but the colours are not evident visually.  It is called The Owl Nebula because of the resemblance to the face of an owl.  6 hours and 30 minutes of LRGB in this image

M97 The Owl Nebula Annotated
M97 Annotated Version

The annotated version above shows many distant galaxies in the same field of view as M97, although obviously these are very much more distant.

M97 Inverted
Annotated Version
M97 The Owl Nebula HOO Palette
HOO Version

The HOO version above shows the Owl Nebula with Hydrogen Alpha mapped as Red channel and OIII mapped to Green and Blue to create the HOO palette colours. 3 hours and 30 minutes of HaOIII.  This HOO image could really do with more data added to it in the Ha and OIII channels and I hope to do this next spring hopefully.

Image Technical Data

This image was captured with TEC 140 refractor and Atik 460 CCD with Astrodon LRGBHaOIII (3nm) filters during Spring 2020 (during the coronavirus lockdown in the UK) from my backyard in Nottingham.  Mount is my MESU 200 guided with OAG.  There is a quite a lot of data in these images as follows.  Everything binned 1×1:

Lum 20 x 600s;  Red 13 x 30s;  Green 12 x 300s;  Blue 13 x 300s;  Ha 12 x 600s; OIII 9 x 600s

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