The Dutch Observatory

Saturday evening when trying to image for the first time a deep sky object with my DMK, I ran out of power on my laptop.  Sunday evening I gave it another try.  Here an unguided image of NGC7662, a planetary nebula in Andromeda, also called the Blue Snowball.  The nebula is 2200 light years away and is 28×32 arc seconds in size and has a magnitude of 8.3.   Last year I did the same object with my Canon.  The image is a composite of LRGB images with each filter 25 frames of 23 seconds each for a total exposure time of approx. 45 minutes (The L component was made with a UV-IR block filter).  Because of the long exposure and not being guided the image does not show too much detail, but the double shell and the center star ar visible.

Transparency was decent but somehow the seeing was not as I was hoping for.  However, I could not resist imaging while the GRS was sliding off the planetary disk and at the same time Europa was getting ready to disappear behind Jupiter.

Here the image from the evening of October 19th 2008 from Charlie Elliott.