Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  M 97  ·  NGC 3587  ·  Owl Nebula  ·  PK148+57.1
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M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse
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M97 Owl Nebula

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Description

After disastrous attempt to use my RC 8" to capture this the other day I returned to my trusty Orion 8" Astrograph which has only half the focal length but at least got something

Guiding etc was working well but transparency was poor and had to give up after only two hours

The dimmer stars very odd due to I think the transparency but I might be wrong ( EDIT - I was wrong it was a stacking issue!)

This is better than the shot I got last year using unmodified camera and no narrow band filter, I managed to get a bit of the outer red tinge, could really do with more time on it plus longer focal length

Wiki tells us .....

The Owl Nebula (also known as Messier 97, M97 or NGC 3587) is a planetary nebula located approximately 2,030 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major.[2] It was discovered by French astronomer Pierre Méchain on February 16, 1781.[5] When William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, observed the nebula in 1848, his hand-drawn illustration resembled an owl's head. It has been known as the Owl Nebula ever since.[6]

The nebula is approximately 8,000 years old.[7] It is approximately circular in cross-section with a little visible internal structure. It was formed from the outflow of material from the stellar wind of the central star as it evolved along the asymptotic giant branch.[4] The nebula is arranged in three concentric shells, with the outermost shell being about 20–30% larger than the inner shell.[8] The owl-like appearance of the nebula is the result of an inner shell that is not circularly symmetric, but instead forms a barrel-like structure aligned at an angle of 45° to the line of sight.[4]

The nebula holds about 0.13 solar masses of matter, including hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur;[4] all with a density of less than 100 particles per cubic centimeter.[8] Its outer radius is around 0.91 ly (0.28 pc) and it is expanding with velocities in the range of 27–39 km/s into the surrounding interstellar medium.[4]

The 14th magnitude central star has since reached the turning point of its evolution where it condenses to form a white dwarf.[5][8] It has 55–60% of the Sun's mass, 41–148 times the brightness of the Sun,[4] and an effective temperature of 123,000 K.[9] The star has been successfully resolved by the Spitzer Space Telescope as a point source that does not show the infrared excess characteristic of a circumstellar disk.[10]

Comments

Revisions

  • M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse
    Original
  • M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse
    B
  • M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse
    C
  • Final
    M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse
    D

B

Description: Crop, slight noise reduction (additional) brightened slightly

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C

Description: Started from scratch .. sorted stacking issue that was causing stars to look odd

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D

Description: Cropped version of reprocessed image with stars looking better ... problem was with deep sky stacker eliminating cold pixels option ... for some reason caused stars to go funny

Uploaded: ...

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M97 Owl Nebula, urmymuse