M57 (5-4-10)

Here is my very own first color shot of M57. It was 4:40 am or so, about an hour before sunup. I was tired and wanted to go back to sleep, so I turned the scope to a target I could find quickly, M57, set PHD to re-calibrate, started the sub-exposure sequence, and then went back in to sleep. Of the thirty or so 120" frames, only 18 were worth keeping (after subtracting out the mount calibration frames and those too bright because of the rising sun), so this is just 36 minutes worth of data. Taken with the Orion 6" I-Newt and the SXVF-H9C. Processing was done in Nebulosity 2, Maxim DL 5, and Photoshop.

The Ring Nebula, as this is known, is one of those targets that everyone with a telescope looks for. Much of the nebula is very bright---the part shown in this image. The Ring Nebula was formed when the star in the center of it (see the image) puffed off its outer layers as it aged; the star's center was putting out too much energy for gravity to hold the outer layers on the star. The Ring Nebula is about 2,300 light years away in the constellation Lyra. The star in the center of the nebula is magnitude 15.3. The dimmest stars in the image visible in this rendition are around magnitude 18. The tiny galaxy just up and a little to the left of the Ring is IC 1296. It is about 200 million light years away.