Midway between Cygnus and Cepheus lies the amazingly beautiful and photogenic Planetary Nebula ngc 7008. This PN shines at magnitude 13.0 so it's quite difficult to spot in the eyepiece. However, it has a very bright central star, so it's surface brightness is a very nice 11.2, which means we can get some good data at this time of the year with a reasonably short exposure. I don't worry about guiding, I just make sure my equipment is well polar aligned and balanced and let Skysensor 2000 sort out the tracking. This way I can easily get untrailed images in multiple 60 second exposures, which is enough to record fairly deep images of most things, particularly Planetaries, which are usually bright. I'll just set the camera to take 100 or so 60 second exposures go and have a cup of tea and come back an hour or so later. There are advantages and disadvantages to this technique. I end up with a load of images to stack, which is fun. I can easily reject those images which may be trailed or otherwise spoiled by atmospheric instability, aircraft trails, satellites, etc. I have to download each 60 sec image which adds to the final noise issue when stacked but SX cameras are very low noise devises. MX5C images are low resolution and the files are very small so the demands on my hard drive are not excessive although using this technique may create issues when using modern large chipped cameras.

There are some interesting features to ngc 7008 which are not fully understood. It looks as though some of ngc 7008's unusual dynamic structure comes from dual layers of radically different dust and gas which may have originated from two different sources and we could be seeing the the result of a binary star in it's dying stages. Another theory is that the structure results from the destruction of brown dwarfs and/or massive planets inside the dust and gas envelopes of giant stars. This may lead to the formations of the observed structures in elliptical planetary nebulae such as ngc 7008. The apparent size of ngc 7008 is quite small at around 1.5' and it is about 2.8KLy distant from us.

My image obtained using AstroArt3. Stacking and colour processing performed in AA3, followed by background noise subtraction and colour balancing again in AA3. Pixinsight was then used to adjust curves and levels and to perform some more dynamic background smoothing and sharpening of the major features of the image, before saving as a TIFF file and conversion to a high quality jpg for web display.