The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543 (lowenthalm)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: Cat's Eye Nebula · IC 4677 · NGC 6543 · PK096+29.1

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The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Some objects make good targets even before it gets dark. One such target is NGC 6543, The Cat's Eye Nebula in Draco. Its so bright that visual observing shows it quite nicely without a dark sky, and the core also makes a good imaging target when the seeing is excellent.

I was blessed with excellent seeing a couple of evenings back on the 10th of July. FWHM of stars were between 1.0 and 1.5 arc seconds with one second exposures. Since the object is so bright, I opted for capturing it using 0.5 second exposures to better freeze atmospheric seeing and jingling from wind and the mount. I captured over 500 half-second exposures of this planetary and stacked them using an RGB Bayer drizzle algorithm in Fitswork. About 420 images made the quality cut during stacking to produce a 0.5 arc second per pixel image. The sharpness of the resulting image was good enough that I just scaled it up 200% using a back-propagation scaling algorithm with mild sharpening to produce a 0.25 arc second per pixel version of the image that better shows the detail in the image to the eye.

A little of the larger background nebula can be seen at the upper left, but as it was not yet dark, it does not show up well. I wasn't particularly worried, since it wasn't the intended star of the show.

NOTE: Astrobin doesn't permit exposure times of fractions of a second, so I had to enter 1s x 210 as the exposure stacking rather than 0.5s x 420.

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ZWO ASI 294MC PRO
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3665463
PixInsight job	6X1Q24KTOSV3NJNE54WPABLD8LOLLPPX
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	17h58m33s.445
RA (top/left)	17h57m48s.847
RA (top/right)	17h58m50s.772
RA (bottom/right)	17h59m18s.990
RA (bottom/left)	17h58m16s.520

Dec (center)	+66°38′03″.45
Dec (top/left)	+66°37′39″.95
Dec (top/right)	+66°33′57″.69
Dec (bottom/right)	+66°38′26″.90
Dec (bottom/left)	+66°42′09″.70

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The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

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The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC 6543

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