Gallery XXXVI - Deep Space - 10/3/04

            I went up to the DCMO to snap a few images of large bright planetary nebulae with the C14 before the moon rose and also to try for Uranus. Aquila was still up so I thought that I'd try there. I had a Lumicon "deep sky" filter on the f3 reducer. The Stellacam II was set to: maximum gain, gamma none, integrations 256. I stacked 80 images "on the fly" with Astrovideo. Images were tweaked in GIMP using curves and then levels.

            Uranus was shot with a Phillips ToUCam on "auto" with K3CCD tools with the frame rate at 5 fps. The resulting AVI was processed with RegistaX 2.

NGC 7681

This is a bright Planetary Nebula in Aquila about 2 minutes in size.

NGC 6804

Also in Aquila this is about a minute in apparent size and is about 4200 ly distant, surface brightness is about m 11.

NGC 6772 - the Helix nebula

This is another PN in Aquilla and is about a minute in apparent size. Mag 12.7 visual

NGC 7293

At 450 ly distant, located in Aquarius, this is the closest PN to earth. It is huge (about 700 seconds) because it is so close. Its magnitude is listed as 7.3 but this is a large and diffuse object which is a little big and diffuse for the C-14 at f3.

Uranus

This is my first attempt. This was at prime focus. I was impressed by its blue color. So its what, about 1.8 billion miles away?

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