Way back in September, Jolene and I made a nighttime trip to Goodsell. We were thinking about doing an astronomy project together and decided to refresh our memories on the telescopes by imaging something cool!
We decided on M-27, the Dumbbell Nebula. M-27 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, near Cygnus the Swan. It was a good one to image that night because it was high in the sky, so its light would have to pass through the least atmosphere to reach our telescope.
Anyway, we hauled the telescope (an 8-inch Meade reflector) out to the launch pad, focused the camera, and then directed the telescope over to M-27!
We were using a CCD camera with red, blue, and green filters, and with each filter (plus with a clear filter) we took ten or so 40-second exposures of M-27.
All of that was back in September! Just yesterday when I was down visiting Carleton, Jolene and I finally got around to processing our images! We aligned them all (because over the course of our imaging, M-27 moved slightly in the sky more than our telescope was compensating for, so the stars showed up in different places), and then we stacked them (because otherwise it would be much too dim)! Then, in photo-shop we channel-mixed the red, blue, and green images and added the clear as a luminance layer to get the final image above!
love, Jimmy
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