Seeing turbulence in the air) wasn’t great. Stars were twinkling away with the best of them which does compromise image quality fairly significantly. Still, I wanted to get M27 again since I re-calibrated the settings for my camera and learned a bit more about exactly how far is too far with a CCD. This is a quick process but sometimes those are the best.
Messier 27 is a ‘planetary’ nebula of highly energetic Hydrogen (red) and Oxygen(blue/green) in the northern constellation of Vulpecula (the Little Fox). What we see is the outer shell of a dying star of about half our Sun’s mass. This is how our star will die, in about another 5 billion years. This nebula is relatively close at 1,360 light years distance. Observations of this nebula put the expansion rate of the gas cloud at about 31km per second in a 1970 study. That puts the age of the nebula at about 9,800 years.
Messier 27 (c) Tim Schuh 2018
- 60 sub exposures of 5 minutes each
- Celestron EdgeHD800 @ F/7.0
- QHY8L CCD @ -10C
- iOptron CEM60 mount
- Orion ST-80 + ZWO ASI120MM-S for guiding