mattie_shoes
Skyscape
The faint nebulosity in the picture is actually our own Milky Way. You can't see the stripe of the Milky way in the image because it's actually wider than this image.
I mainly took this because I wanted to get a feel for how large the Dumbbell Nebula actually is. I've seen it through a telescope, but that's hard to translate to how big something is when you look up at the sky. This image was taken with a plain old 50mm camera lens. The nebula is small enough that you really have to look at the original size to see it. It's quite visible as a blueish dumbbell just above and to the left of center and it's not much bigger than the stars, only a few pixels across... That makes sense since the Dumbbell Nebula is a planetary nebula. When a medium sized star like our own dies, it blows off the outer shell of gas first which slowly expands, making a small, short-lived nebula. Our own sun is fated to do this in a few billion years.
With the help of planetarium software, I picked out several of the other faint fuzzy objects in this neighborhood. Most of them appear as faint fuzzy light patches not much bigger than a star on the original sized image, with the exception of the coathanger.
30 minutes of total exposure time in 17 subexposures, F/4, ISO 1600. Three darks were taken as well. All of it was combined in DeepSkyStacker. Adjusted a bit and added constellation lines in photoshop.
Skyscape
The faint nebulosity in the picture is actually our own Milky Way. You can't see the stripe of the Milky way in the image because it's actually wider than this image.
I mainly took this because I wanted to get a feel for how large the Dumbbell Nebula actually is. I've seen it through a telescope, but that's hard to translate to how big something is when you look up at the sky. This image was taken with a plain old 50mm camera lens. The nebula is small enough that you really have to look at the original size to see it. It's quite visible as a blueish dumbbell just above and to the left of center and it's not much bigger than the stars, only a few pixels across... That makes sense since the Dumbbell Nebula is a planetary nebula. When a medium sized star like our own dies, it blows off the outer shell of gas first which slowly expands, making a small, short-lived nebula. Our own sun is fated to do this in a few billion years.
With the help of planetarium software, I picked out several of the other faint fuzzy objects in this neighborhood. Most of them appear as faint fuzzy light patches not much bigger than a star on the original sized image, with the exception of the coathanger.
30 minutes of total exposure time in 17 subexposures, F/4, ISO 1600. Three darks were taken as well. All of it was combined in DeepSkyStacker. Adjusted a bit and added constellation lines in photoshop.