Color picture taken August 2020 – M27, The Dumbbell Nebula. I have taken this image several times before as one of my favorite objects (exactly a year ago with my 12″ telescope) and I decided to repeat it with my newer 102 mm refractor. This image shows more detail than last years version and a larger area of the surrounding stars with many more faint stars since I took much longer images. The night was beautiful and stable, and the refractor has the sharpest and stable focus of any of my telescopes. There were 28 images shot in 4 colors at 5 minutes exposure for each image. It was a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes of integration time.
This is 1300 light years away and is a gaseous remnant of a star similar to our sun that is at the end of its life. There is a white dwarf at the center that illuminates the exploded gas.
These are two color images of M27 the Dumbbell Nebula. The first was taken Thursday August 20th over a 3 hour period with my 10″ SCT and is made up of LRGB images shot at 5 minutes per image at -10 degrees centigrade. There were between 3 and 5 images taken per color and it was combined with Nebulosity 4 and Photoshop CS 2015. I have taken this before in monochrome and in color (2nd picture in 2005) on my old camera, and I can see that the color separation filters that I’m using now is giving much closer color to the greenish blue color that should be in the center. The image has come a long way since my first tries in 2005 with the same telescope.
This object is another exploded star collapsed into a white dwarf which lights up the gas causing the colors.. This is in an extremely dense region of the Milky Way with many older stars. The sky was somewhat hazy last night and the wind picked up making guiding impossible, otherwise I would have combined more images. The dumbell goes form lower left to upper right and the wispy sections at the top and bottom require longer exposures than my guiding would have supported previously. I’m extremely pleased with my new camera, filters, color filter wheel and mount/scope.
