The Owl Nebula is a planetary nebula located approximately 2,030 light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. This object is known as M97 and NGC 3587. It was discovered by French astronomer Pierre Méchain on February 16, 1781. 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.

The nebula is approximately 8,000 years old. 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. The nebula is arranged in three concentric shells, with the outermost shell being about 20–30% larger than the inner shell. 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.

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

The 14th magnitude central star has since reached the turning point of its evolution where it condenses to form a white dwarf. It has 55–60% of the Sun's mass, 41–148 times the brightness of the Sun, and an effective temperature of 123,000 K. (Source Wikipedia)

The image was captured with the Meade 12"LX200, using the Atik 383L+ mono at F7.16. Astronomik's RGB filters were used along with the Ha filter for luminance. All subs were taken at 1x1 bin, -10C, and 10 minutes each.

Ha : 28 subs (4.67 hr) on Mar 29th and Apr 9th.

Red : 13 subs (2.17 hr) on Mar 31 and Apr 8th.

Green : 11 subs (1.83 hr) on Mar 31 and Apr 8th.

Blue : 8 subs (1.33 hr) on Mar 31 and Apr 8th.

Processing was done with PixInsight, following (for the most part) kayronjm's tutorial of Feb. 24th. Only Ha was used to develop the Luminance image. R, G and B were collected for the color mix.

North is up. This is a sizeable crop, mainly to increase the target size.

I am not all that pleased with the outcome. Ha (even with 4.67 hrs) was noisy. The RGB combo just would not produce a neutral background. So I'm keeping this mainly for documentation.

The second image is a little better than the first. This resulted from leaving a bit more green in the whole image.