The Dumbbell Nebula | M27

The Dumbbell Nebula is a planetary nebula and is in the constellation Vulpecula, It’s ~1227 light years away from us. “Plantetary nebubla” is kind of a misnomer because it doesn’t have anything to do with planets, the gasses and colors come from a star that has shed its outer layers. If you squint or zoom in, you can see the white dwarf star in the middle. Charles Messier first noted it in his catalog of objects in the night sky as Messier Object 27 in 1764. The Dumbbell Nebula gets its name from English Astronomer John Herchel, who thought its shape resembled a dumbbell. - You can view this object with a small telescope, or even binoculars.

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s at +1.4x Teleconverter (700mm) at f/8

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

25 x 180" for 1 hour 15 min and 25 sec of exposure time.

6 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bais frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

Photoshop

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap (what an amazing system for aligning). I'm not comfortable using my SCT as my lens yet. My solution is to piggyback my Sony a7RIII and adapted Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s on a ADM dovetail rail on the top of my optical tube. For this I used a 1.4x teleconverter making the focal length 700mm at f/8. I used DeepSkyStacker to combine all frames and then processed the TIFF file in Photoshop. I stretched the 32 bit file and used Gradient XT on the image. I then made it a 16 bit file and stretched in level, then curves. I used the color sampler tool and levels to do my best to keep the background space black. I did mask the nebula and bring some color out on it, while not adding the color to the stars and deep space. I then using my skillset and relyed on Astronomy Tools Action Set, and dodging and burning a bit to give the image the finishing touches.

Done