Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Lyra (Lyr)  ·  Contains:  IC 1296  ·  M 57  ·  NGC 6720  ·  PK063+13.1  ·  Ring Nebula
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M57 The Ring Nebula in LRGB, Bogdan Borz
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M57 The Ring Nebula in LRGB

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M57 The Ring Nebula in LRGB, Bogdan Borz
Powered byPixInsight

M57 The Ring Nebula in LRGB

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Description

The Ring Nebula (called in French La nébuleuse de la Lyre,  not La nébuleuse de l'anneau) was (re) discovered in 1779 by Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix, who was born in Toulouse, where I took this picture! It was re-discovered 2 weeks after Charles Messier because Darquier de Pellepoix was looking for Comet Bode and the nebula was located nearby (but Britannica credits him with the discovery). He was the one that probably generated the term "planetary nebula" with his description of M57 : "...as large as Jupiter and resembles a planet which is fading" (source: Wikipedia). 

The nebula is located at around 2500 ly from Earth, in Lyra and the central star is a white dwarf that has exhausted its hydrogen fuel. The inner core is actually 200 brighter than the Sun. 

This was a complicated project and a first test for my new Baader LRGB filter set (replacing the ZWO). Weather was awful here this year and the seeing was really bad. I had to throw hours of integration due to bad guiding (wind and bad seeing gave me a lot of headache). I wanted to use Ha but I had not enough integration time. So this is pure LRGB and the faint extension is what I could obtain from my light polluted backyard using L/R filters. I realized too late that this nebula is a perfect candidate for a SHO project ... maybe next year.  Pleased to see the small galaxy IC 1296 close-by, a barred spiral galaxy.

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