New Astrophoto of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula.

Quirky, Like a Fox

In the last couple of weeks we’ve had a handful of clear nights (finally) and while I had the wide field camera/scope setup at home I thought I would try to see how well it would do on a smaller target like a large planetary nebula; M27 is one of the largest so I gave it a shot.

Here’s what I came up with:

M27, the Dumbbell Nebula in the quirky little constellation of Vulpecula, the Fox. (Click for a larger image)

When I started on this object I wasn’t sure if the scope/camera combination I had would have enough resolution to make an object this small big enough without looking all low-res and pixelated. As it turns out it was fine since the SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm scope gives such crystal clear views and is light enough that the mount doesn’t struggle.

I was pleasantly surprised that even though the object fills just a tiny portion of the camera’s view with that scope the details are still quite crisp, although I wouldn’t want to go much smaller. Unless you zoom waaay in on the final image above it looks pretty crisp and there’s decent detail there. You need to include a certain amount of space around something like this to give it some context and that helps with perceived resolution of the image too.

For example, here is (almost) the entire camera frame:

I had an older picture of M27 that I took back in 2018 before I really knew what I was doing and am happy to have this fine update to replace that one. UPDATE to the update!
In 2023 with a telescope that had almost 2.5 times the focal length of this one, I again imaged this great target. Here is the result:

So what is M27?

Officially these are known as “planetary nebulae” which is really horrible name because as it turns out they have nothing at all to do with planets. The name arises from when they started seeing these kinds of things in telescopes in the mid 18th century they kinda had the roundish, non-stellar appearance that planets have in the eyepiece. It wasn’t until many years later the underlying physics of these things were discovered: they are normal stars at the very last stages of their evolutionary paths. This is roughly what the Sun will look like in 5 billion years or so.

Really big ‘supergiant’ stars go out in a blaze of glory; a supernova explosion that can be seen literally across the entire Universe. Normal mass stars can’t do that so they gradually expand to become what are known as Red Giant stars with very thin, tenuous boundaries. As things go gradually more and more wrong in the core of the star due to the fact that all the hydrogen has been burned into helium and the star is now trying to fuse helium into something heavier and so on and so on and all of these reactions are less and less productive there are little core collapses, outbursts and disturbances that gradually take the thin outer layers of the star and push them off into the neighboring space leaving just the core of the star, now known as a ‘white dwarf’.

The white dwarf star is still sending out some energetic radiation which causes all the drifted off layers nearby to glow, mostly in the light of doubly ionized oxygen (O3). M27 is a decent object in binoculars and is super easy with almost any telescope.

Full Moon for Halloween

I shot this right around Halloween and we had a full moon that night (shows what you can do when shooting through filters even when the moon is up) so I thought it would also be a good test to shoot the full moon and see how detailed I could get on that photo.

The full moon is super bright—my exposure length was five ten thousandths of a second! The other thing that was interesting is that this is a ‘color’ picture, even though it doesn’t really look like it.

The Full Moon on Halloween, 2020. Click to see larger and go exploring!

Skull Session

Every year on Halloween I post my pic of the Skull Nebula, but for this year I did a little extra work on it to give it a processing boost!