M64, M27 and M57

Took a few images  today of a galaxy and a couple planetary nebulas.  The first one I'll feature is M64 in Coma Berenices.  This 9th magnitude galaxy is about 25 million light years away.   The Black Eye comes from a patch of dark dust which obscures the bright part of the galaxy behind it.

The next object is a fun one to image, and its been photographed to death.  Messier 27, or the Dumbbell Nebula.  It looks like an apple core to me...  The remnants of a dead star is about 1350 light years away in the constellation Vulpecula.  The central star is a white dwarf, and is the largest white dwarf known.

The 3rd object, I've imaged before, M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra.  This is an easy object because it is quite bright.  Although bright, it is small.  Although it can be seen in binoculars, they wont provide enough magnification to be able to tell what it is.  A telescope 6 inches in diameter, and about 100 power will show its ring like appearance.

M27 Narrowband

If I ever needed proof of the difference in image quality one gets with a dedicated CCD vs a dslr, this has to be it.  I imaged in 2 colors, 8 3 minute frames per color (Ha and Oiii), mapped the Ha to red and the Oiii to green and blue.  The amount of stretching in photoshop was nil - just a wee bit to bring out the edges, but for the most part, this is how bright this appeared on the capture screen.

If that werent enough, I didnt stop there.  I re-mapped this into a Hubble Palette version.  Even more detail is visible!

Not bad for a 2-color image.  This narrowband stuff is turning out to be too much fun!  I still cant get over the fact that I did this with about 45 minutes worth of camera time.

This is a picture of last year's M27 taken with the dslr. 

Although not a BAD image, there was a lot of image stretch to bring out the fine detail, and lots more imaging and processing time.  Of course, this is a standard RGB using the dslr.