Beautiful Stellar Destruction

[Les]

When medium massed stars  use up their nuclear fuel they often go nova. The explosion blows of the stars outer layers leaving the lower layers and core. The star is not destroyed but is dying. The cloud shell which expands at 100's of kms a second and fluoresces giving distinct green and blue tinges. Its sobering to think in a few billion years from now our Sun may also have such a beautiful expanding shroud. It means toast for us but delight for any far off alien astronomers that may be watching.

These are call Planetary Nebula even though they a neither and dozens are visible to the amateur.

These are just two in the Summer/Autumn sky. The Ring Nebula and Dumbell Nebula. Taken last night with a 400mm Newtonian prime focus using a Nikon 3200 3200ISO 20 sec ex.

DSLR's are particularly good at picking up nebulae in general.

[Denis]

I have only dabbled a little in astro Les, mostly to do with the milky Way on my D7500 using a 11-16mm Tokina wide angle lens. I have a 200-500mm telephoto lens but cant seem to do a lot with that apart from the moon. but I know JohnP gets good results from his superzoom bridge camera.  Great photos by the way, this stuff interests me

[Les]

Another Planetary this one is in Gemini appropriately a winter constellation as its called the Eskimo Nebula as it resembles a Eskimo peering out of his parker hood. Exposure 7 seconds at 3200 ISO

[Denis]

I do like these images you post Les,and as you say , you dont need a huge budget either...

[Les]

HI Dennis,

Indeed my Newtonian is on a driven Dobsonian mount, which is not really designed for long DSLR exposures. Much smaller scopes on these mounts in theory can also give good results but the lower light grasp of these mean longer exposure times are needed with the inherent  inaccuracies of the Dobsonian altazimuth system causing unacceptable trailing.

With a 16" mirror the extra light grasp means I can keep exposures below 30 seconds.  

[Les]

As I have said DSLR a surprisingly good at giving reasonable results of Planetary Nebulae. However one famous one is the Owl Nebula (so called because of its owl appearance) near the Plough asterism, has the humble DSLR struggling. I think this is due to it being older and spread out and losing a lot of the fluorescent wavelengths  that DSLR are good at picking up.

The Owl eyes are detectable visually but the central star isn't but it does appear on images easily.

Funnily enough a owl was hooting last night while I was observing it.

Although not that good I've included a image of this ghostly object using the above equipment. I ramped up the ISO to 6400 with a exposure of 20 seconds.

[Les]

M97 Owl Nebula

Edited March 1, 2022 by Les