M97 in Ha (April 8, 2014)

This planetary nebula in Ursa Major is one of the few popular narrowband targets up during the spring.  It's a bright one, too.  This is only H-alpha.  I hope to get the OIII, too, and combine them.  But the night I set up to collect the OIII data became unexpectedly cloudy at 11 pm.  Oh, well.  In the meantime, M97 is slipping behind my trees.  I may have to wait till next year.  Either way, the data interests me.

This data is 8x1200" with the 6nm Proti Astronomik Ha filter and 10x900" with the 12nm Astronomik Ha filter.  The dimmest stars in the image are below magnitude 19.

Full resolution image here.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader MPCC
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (8x1200" with the 6nm Proti Astronomik Ha filter and 10x900" with the 12nm Astronomik Ha filter), Alnitak Flatman flats
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX SFW+OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M97 (11-30 and 12-1-2010)

This planetary nebula in Ursa Major is, like all planetary nebulae, an expanding cloud of gas and dust sloughed off a dying star. The star, which you can see in the center of the nebula, is a white dwarf, the super-hot core of what is left of the dying star. The filters used to take this shot cover three wavelengths common to planetary nebulae: Ha, NII, and OIII. In fact, the Ha filter's bandwidth is 12nm wide, and it takes in the NII line. The consequence is that I can't tell whether the red glow in this image comes from hydrogen or nitrogen. The OIII line is far more prominent, however. Ionized oxygen seems to dominate this planetary. M97's distance (and thus its size) are the subject of wildly varying reports, so I have no idea how far away this thing is.

This image is 24x8' with the Astronomik Ha filter and 23x8' with the Astronomik OIII filter. The camera was the Atik 16, and the image was shot through the Orion 120mm achromat with the WO 0.8x II ff/fr, at f/4. Color was done with Cannistra's bi-color technique.

Here is the Ha [+ NII]:
Here is the OIII: