M57 Ring Nebula (Joe Niemeyer)

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

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M57 Ring Nebula

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M57 Ring Nebula

This my image of the Ring Nebula (M57). It is in a class of deep sky objects called planetary nebulae. The term is a misnomer because they are totally unrelated to planets. The term originates from the planet-like round shape of these nebulae observed by astronomers through early telescopes. Such a nebula is formed when a medium-size star expels ionized gas during the last stages of its life before becoming a white dwarf. You can see the tiny white dwarf star in the center of this nebula surrounded by colorful gases it cast off thousands of years ago. Our own Sun will eventually meet the same fate as its hydrogen is consumed in the course of billions of years of nuclear fusion. It's been nice knowing you!

M57 is about a light-year in diameter and is located some 2,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra below the bright star Vega. The deep blue central color is from very hot helium; the blue/green is from ionized oxygen; and the orange/red is from ionized nitrogen. These gases glow as they are bathed in ultraviolet radiation from the remnant central star, whose surface temperature is a white-hot 120,000 degrees Celsius. There is a bonus near the bottom of this image -- the barred spiral galaxy IC 1296.

I made this image from a stack of sixteen 300-second exposures shot at 2310mm focal length, calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I highly cropped the image since the disk of M57 is only about one arcminute in size and then post-processed it with Photoshop, StarNet++, and DeNoise AI.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
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This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4762880
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M57 Ring Nebula

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