M57 - a giant dolly mixture (Tom Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Lyra (Lyr) · Contains: IC 1296 · M 57 · NGC 6720 · Ring Nebula

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M57 - a giant dolly mixture

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M57 - a giant dolly mixture

Looking like a large dolly mixture, this was a test shot of the seeing last Monday - as you can see it was not good, at least for imaging at 2000mm (f10). My homemade autoguider was doing overtime (chasing the seeing) with RMS exceeding my pixel scale!

Imaging at f10 is challenging at the best of times, and a final outing with M52 was in order, until next summer. A lot of noise, and despite good focusing, rather blurry as a result. Collected in Envisage, stacked and aligned in Nebulosity and processed in Startools.

I used a nonlinear stretch (DDP), clipping the data by raising the black point and lowering the white point to manage sky brightening. Selective HDR brightening and deconvolution were applied selectively to the ring, to try and tease out some detail, whilst retaining the small galaxy (IC 1296) lower left.

I'm sorry about the pink halo, not my favourite colour or best representation of this iconic supernova remnant, but try as I might I struggled to improve this without totally messing up the background. Noise reduction and contrast boost completed this LRGB image.

I also collected some luminance data through my L-eNhance narrowband filter, so will try adding this in to see if it improves matters. You can just about determine the barred spiral nature of IC 1296, which lies some 240m LY outside our galaxy, compared with M57 at 3,200 LY.

Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4034225
PixInsight job	122F7LMX78BS77L0WR0ORPRE6YE7EYNE
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h53m22s.176
RA (top/left)	18h52m48s.622
RA (top/right)	18h53m50s.173
RA (bottom/right)	18h53m55s.723
RA (bottom/left)	18h52m54s.213

Dec (center)	+33°01′26″.78
Dec (top/left)	+32°57′14″.70
Dec (top/right)	+32°55′43″.12
Dec (bottom/right)	+33°05′38″.35
Dec (bottom/left)	+33°07′10″.50

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M57 - a giant dolly mixture

M57 - a giant dolly mixture

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M57 - a giant dolly mixture

M57 - a giant dolly mixture

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