The Dutch Observatory

October 28, 2008 on 3:20 pm | In Deep Sky Objects | Comments Off

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.