M57 - The Ring Nebula

When a star with a mass similar to that of our sun nears the end of its life, it blows off a shell of gas that, from our perspective, appears like a ring centered around a dying star. M57, the Ring Nebula, represents the remains of one such disgorging episode about 20,000 years ago. The first planetary nebula discovered has worked its way ever since into the hearts of virtually all telescopic observers. And rightly so, because no other planetary appears so distinctive in small apertures. It is a challenging binocular object, well placed in the northern sky about 6½° southeast of brilliant Vega (Alpha [α] Lyrae), and nearly halfway between the eclipsing binary star Beta Lyrae (whose brightness fluctuates between magnitude 3.3 and 4.3 every 12.9 days) and 3rd- magnitude Gamma Lyrae. Telescopically, M57's tiny 9th- magnitude annulus of gray smoke floats against a rich Milky Way field crisscrossed with dark streamers some of which appear to be as gray and smoky as the Ring Nebula itself. The "ring" is actually a torus (doughnut-shaped) viewed looking down the hole. This is unlike the planetary M27, which is seen side on. The 0.4-light-year-wide gaseous wreath of M57 was likely blown off the white dwarf central star some 20,000 years ago and is still expanding at a rate of about 16.5 miles per second or about one arc second per century.

Telescope:	Meade 10" LX200 OTA
Focal Length:	2500 mm
Mount:	Takahashi NJP 160
Camera	Starlight XPress MX916
Guider:	unguided
Exposures:	several 180-second exposures
Location:	Cicero, IN
Software:	AstroArt
Notes:	This was my very first color image! Several 180 second exposures were stacked (averaged) to create a single image. A Richardson-Lucy filter was applied to reduce the tracking error of the telescope