M27: The Dumbell Nebula, Take 2

A few years ago, I took a image of this and didn’t even record what I used. Recently, I’ve been playing around with new equipment, in particular an AstroTech 6″ Ritchie-Chretien that hasn’t seem much use since I bought it. This particular scope really needs a bigger imager than my little Meade DSI Pro II, but that’s what I used here.

Remember, this is from an urban, light-polluted sky, here in Brooklyn. There are some problems; although the image was calibrated with darks and flats, it looks like I have a few dead pixels so you have that odd black spot on the left side of the nebula. If you look really close, you’ll see a few more in the shadows. Some of this may just be that the camera is not thermally controlled, so a pixel that’s particularly sensitive to temperature changes results in systematic miscalibration is there is thermal drift during the imaging session. (There was, darks were taken quite late, or rather early, near sunrise).

I have this full-color image, but I’m actually not even sure what scope I used to take this. Possibly my Orion 120ST (an achromat no less!) but it was a 3-color composite. The image is stored in a directory labelled as 2019, but I’m missing the metadata to be sure.

Still, overall I’m pretty happy with the above. It’s way better than my earlier attempt from several years ago which you can see here.