The Dumbell is a planetary nebula that needs little introduction, as it is an incredibly popular and bright target, though more exposure is needed to bring out the fainter outer regions. Located in
Vulpecula the nebula and its progenitor central white dwarf, are about 1400 light-years away. The age of the nebula is between about 10,000 to 15,000 years, based on the measured expansion of the nebula.
Attached is my processing of 19 hours of Ha and OIII data from the RASC
Robotic Telescope. Raw data was calibrated, registered and stacked using
DeepSkyStacker. The bulk of the image processing was done using
Startools, using an L(H)HOO compositing[b], [/b]and included the use of the local contrast, HDR, multi-scale sharpening, and noise reduction modules. Final tweaks were done in
Photoshop, including specific Camera Raw sharpening and noise reduction, and
Astronomy Tools actions.
Data was from 2020 May to July, from the f/8.9 RASC RCOS 16" (3550mm focal length) robotic telescope on a Paramount ME mount, which is located at Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California. Image subs consisted of 19x1800 s each of Ha and OIII at 1x1 with an SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096) CCD camera and SBIG Ha (7nm) and OIII (8.5nm) Narrowband Filters. Flats and bias frames and darks for the lights were provided for calibration.
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