There have been several nice days and I can't help but take advantage of them. I usually only get out once a week but I made it out twice this week. I ended up capturing the Ring Nebula M57. The object is in the constellation Lyra. This was one of the first deep space objects that I saw through my first large aperture telescope which is a Meade 12" Light Bridge. I remember the first time I looked through it, I couldn't believe how many stars I could see. My last telescope was only 60mm in diameter so bumping up from 60 to 300 was a significant jump. I have really enjoyed this telescope. I have looked through a 24" and 30" diameter telescope and they show a lot of detail and few more stars but for the portability I can't be the view of my 12" telescope. My 4" refractor APO is pretty much dedicated to photography. I don't take the camera off it very often but when I do and look at the stars with it, I am amazed at how pin point the stars are. The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula which is a star that has burned up most of its fuel and is collapsing from gravity. The nebula are the left over gases from the dying star which turns into a white dwarf. You can see the white dwarf in the center of the nebula in this picture. The star is very small. This object is has an apparent size of 4 arc minutes which is pretty small for my telescope. I ended up framing this in a 640x480 pixel size. I was able to get 77 frames @ 180secs exposure on each. Enjoy! A larger telescope with a larger focal length would work better for this picture.
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