Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years (George Simon)

Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years

M27 is one of a handful of bright Messier objects that I imaged when I first entered the hobby about 15 years ago and have not revisited since. It recently occurred to me that it was high time to revisit these targets.

Processing the data for this image proved to be quite enjoyable. As I began, I was curious to see how much of the dim, outer shell of M27 I would be able to pull out. In truth, I had quite low expectations, given the quality of my skies (Bortle 5), the proximity to the target of a gibbous Moon, and the relatively short integration time I was devoting to the project. And indeed, the final image only hints at the presence of the outer shell. Still, I was pleased to be able to tease out faint indications of the outer shell. The dense star field in which the Dumbbell is situated posed an interesting challenge. My general practice would be to engage in heavy-duty star reduction in scenarios such as this, so as to better highlight the object of interest. However, M27 is so bright that, to my eye at least, rather than detracting from the nebula, the star field provided contrast and helped push it to the foreground. As a result, the star field you see in the final image has not been subjected to a lot of manipulation.

What I learned from this brief, little project is that "gimme" targets that we thought we might have outgrown can still provide us with a pleasant couple of days of acquisition and processing.

Original
B
C
Final
D

B

Description: After living with the image for 24 hours, I decided that the dense star field was, in fact, detracting somewhat from the main target. So, I have pushed the star field considerably into the background, while saturating the stars a tad more.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Reprocessed from scratch, with an eye toward producing a less dense star field.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: I managed to bring out more of the outer shell.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8019239
PixInsight job	n/a
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Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years

Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years

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Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years

Revisiting the Dumbbell Nebula After 15 Years

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