The Dumbbell Nebula (also Messier 27 and NGC 6853) is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1360 light-years. It is very bright at magnitude 7.5. The inner core is 8 arcminutes diameter while the much fainter outer core double the diameter of the object.
The object was very well placed, reaching zenith at the witching hour. I recorded about 16 hours of SHO.
I was inspired by this apod image and the author gives a very complete & inspiring processing tutorial here.
For processing, I went “free style” to discover the dataset but will revisit with a more systematic approach at some point. The bright stars have green halos due to my suboptimal OIII filter (but do I really need to spend 1G on an Astrodon filter to solve this?). Also during processing it became evident I need to complete this dataset with a starfield; it took a couple weeks, but this goal has now been achieved and the RGB field is now available below. The RGB data, initially intended as a starfield only, can be processed as a color image in its own right (see below), at least for the inner core. Anyways, here it is, still a work in progress for processing. Also note for once I tried a composition effort, with the bright star to the left and the Dumbbell nebula off-center to the right.
M27 is still very well placed and I am toying with the idea of adding an OIII bonus dataset.
