Messier 57, known as the Ring nebula, is a famous planetary nebula located ~ 2,500 light-years away in the constellation of Lyra. 

M57 was always a favorite object for me when observing with a small telescope over the years.  It should be no surprise that I was interested in imaging it once I began my journey into astrophotography.  I have shot this target twice before - once in 2019 when I first started and again one year later in 2020.  

These images were not all that great - I really did not know what I was doing, and M57 is a very small target for the scopes I was using.

Lately, though, I had been thinking about trying this again.   M57 is well positioned for me during this time of the year, and I wanted to try it again with my AP130 EDT APO - this has the longest focal length of all of my scopes. I also wanted to use the ZWO ASI2600MM-pro camera as this was the most sensitive of the cameras I now have. 

I also wanted to really push to get a long integration (assuming that mother nature would cooperate for once!), and I wanted to capture Ha data along with the LRGB Data.  I was hoping to capture the faint outer rings of expanding gas that is not seen visually and not typically shown in most amateur Astro Images.   Could I capture this detail with a 5" scop in my driveway?

I captured a whopping 17.5 hours of data (a record for me at my location!), only to have to cull 2.5 hours due to high thin clouds that acted to bloat the brighter stars. OUCH!

But the resulting image still has the longest iteration I have ever done, and I successfully captured the outer shells of expanding gas!  I was also able to capture some good detail on IC 1296 - the cute little barred spiral galaxy just above M57 in this image.  This little guy is 450 million light-years away! It's not often that you have a planetary nebula in the same field of view as a galaxy.  One is seen typically looking towards the center of our galaxy, and he other is seen when looking away from teh center toward the outer reaches of space!

The story behind this image, as well as a complete processing walkthrough showing the unorthodox way I ended processing this image, can be seen at:
https://cosgrovescosmos.com/projects/m57-ha-halo

Please note that for the very first time, I included a short video introduction for the project.  I don't normally do videos, so this is an experiment. Let me know if you like this addition (but be kind - I barely know what I am doing with video!). 

Thanks for looking!  Let me know if you have any questions.

Pat