Saturday 1 June 2013

The Ring and the Dumbbell Nebulae

These images were taken using a Altair ED 2X two inch Barlow lens, a ten inch F 4.8
reflector , PHD autoguiding and an Atik 383L mono CCD camera.  The bright planetary
nebula M57, the Ring nebula, shines at about magnitude 8 and lies in the constellation of
Lyra the Harp . Five minute sub frames were captured with matching dark frames, making
total exposure times of twenty minutes for each colour channel . The same equipment and
exposure time were used for M27 , the Dumbbell nebula.