Ring Nebula, M57

Notes

The Ring Nebula or M57 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Lyra, about 2500 LY from us. The "planetary" part here is a misnomer as these have nothing to do with planets. Instead, according to Wikipedia, such nebula are formed when a star as part of evolving into a white dwarf ejects ionized gas to form a huge luminous envelope around it. In better images of this nebula one can see the central star of the nebula. This nebula is also interesting because it is expanding at a rate that can be seen on human timescales, with differences seen in photographs over a 50 year period.

I captured the pictures that went into this image over 4 nights in August 2023. This target is quite high in the sky so I managed to get between 2 and 3 hours of images per night, versus my typical 1 hour per night due to trees. This target is quite small at under 4 arcmin, so what you are seeing is a "zoomed in" view. That accounts for the significantly degraded (noisy) quality of the image. But this is my first image in months after equipment issues, bad weather, Canadian wildfire smoke, then more bad weather. So it is satisfying to actually get some data that I could process.

There is another object of interest in the same image. Just to upper left of the Ring is the galaxy IC 1296. Though it "looks" close to the Ring, that galaxy is actually 240M LY away, i.e. almost 100,000x as far away as the Ring, and incomparably larger at an estimated 120,000 LY across.

Ring Nebula, M57

August 2023

Gallery

Notes