My New and Improved Ring Nebula, Dumbbell Nebula and Pleiades Open Cluster

As you may remember, I had my telescope out at the time of writing last post. At that time I already noticed that I was too late to get an awesome image of the Ring Nebula, I took better photos of the Dumbbell Nebula at different settings and tried to capture some Pleiades nebulosity. While working on last post, I was waiting for clouds to pass over, but eventually, they didn’t.

I think I’d better postpone my efforts to capture a glimpse of the Horsehead and Flame Nebula untill the Orion constellation is higher, somewhere in December, Januari… Apparently I live in an area where amateur astronomers are being terrorized every evening by foggy skies. By the time deep sky objects in Orion are high enough to be imaged, fog has already kicked in.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned, I also shot some decend images of other objects. I started with the Ring Nebula. But after my first test image, the photos became too faint because the roof was partially obstructing the view. The single frame I did get turned out quite nice by the way:

A single frame of the Ring Nebula.

When I manage to get more and longer exposures of the ring nebula, it should display more yellow and red features.

As quickly as I found the Ring Nebula, it took me over 10 minutes to get the Dumbbell Nebula (M27) in view. I took 12 good 15 seconds frames at ISO 6400 and 7 good 30 second frames at ISO 1600. The ISO 1600 frames showed less noise and stacked nicer so I used those to get the image below. I really like the amount of stars visible in the image. M27 is located in the constellation Cygnus which lies exactly over the star littered arm of the Milky Way.

Long exposure stack of the Dumbbell Nebula (M27)

My 5 stacked 30 second exposures of the Pleiades open cluster (M45) do finally show some faint blue nebulosity around the stars. Especially the lowest of the 6 brightest stars shows a glow with a well defined edge. The lines at the bottom right are the remains of an airplane saying ‘Hi’ while I was imaging.