Derby and District Astronomical Society

Messier 97 (NGC 3587)
The Owl Nebula

Planetary Nebula in Ursa Major      RA 11h 14m 48s  Dec +55d 01m 00s

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This image of the Owl Nebula was taken on the 1st March 2006 by Adrian Brown. He used a Skywatcher 80ED refractor at f7.5, an ATIK ATK16HR camera, Astronomik LRGB and CLS filters, and a Celestron CGE mount.The total exposure times were Luminance 80 minutes, Red 64 minutes, Green 64 minutes and Blue 64 minutes. 10 minute sub exposure times were used for the Luminance filter and 8 minute sub exposure times were used for the RGB filters.

Chris Newsome and Adrian Brown captured this image of the Owl Nebula on the 19th February 2006. They used a Canon EOS300D camera at 400 ASA through Adrian's Celestron C11. This was fitted with a f/6.3 focal reducer and set up on a CGE mount. Guiding used Guidedog software and focusing employed DSLRFocus. An Astronomik CLS filter was also used to remove sodium light. Four images were taken at 210 seconds exposure and calibrated in Maxim DL. The resulting image was processed in CS2 using RGB levels, curves, GradientXTerminator and a highpass filter. Chris comments: "An incredibly faint object to image. When the final image was created prior to processing in CS2, the nebula was virtually invisible! The advantage of digital imaging is that you can see after a very short period of time what adjustments are needed to start to get an image with a correct exposure and this image, although not a particularly spectacular one, does give a good starting point."

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