The Owl Nebula

Roger More

By Roger More, 1734998618

The Owl Nebula (M97) is a small planetary nebula about 2030 light years distant and about 8000 years old.  It occupies an area of 3.4 x 3.3 arc-minutes in apparent size, corresponding to a diameter of 1.82 light years wide. It consists of two concentric shells of gas surrounding a central binary star system. The outer shell of M97 is expanding outward at a speed of about 27 kilometres per second, as inferred from its observed Doppler shift.

Since it is so small and it was imaged at 550mm focal length, I drizzled 3x to pull more detail from the data.

The final image is heavily cropped.

There is a faint, dispersed, outer shell evident.


The Owl Nebula

Tunefultog said, 1735329341

That's a nice shot.  There's lots of detail in the nebula.

Here's is a picture of the Phantom of the Opera nebula I took about 3 months ago from home.  Unlike many nebulae it's nickname fits it's appearance.  It has the designation Sh2-173, and another object, Sh2-172 can just be seen below it's 'chin' near the bottom of the frame.  I picked this object a bit before Halloween as it seemed appropriate then.  It subtends an angle slightly less than the apparent size of the full moon.  I thought an object with a face might be appropriate for a modelling site.

This object is quite faint by amateur astrophotography standards, but I tend to edit more fiercely than most.  It was taken with a ZWO ASI 2400MC Pro camera at -15C with an Astro Physics AP130 telescope on a Paramount MX+.  The exposure was 6 x 20 minutes.  I struggle with this mount because it's too convoluted and complicated for me, although it can take a big payload.

Hopefully the link will work, I've been struggling to post this for a couple of hours.

file:///C:/Astro/13--14-9-24%20Sh2-%20173%20Phantom/Sh2-173_pp_res.jpg