Messier 108 and The Owl Nebula (M 97)
(Click on Picture for larger view)

Added May 20, 2019 ...
The Owl Nebula (lower left) is a planetary nebula (which resembled an owl's head) located approximately 2,030 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is approximately 8,000 years old and was formed from the outflow of material from the stellar wind of the central star which has now evolved into a white dwarf.

Messier 108, also known as "The Surfboard Galaxy" (upper right), is a barred spiral galaxy and is seen almost edge-on. It contains about 400 billion stars (as compared with our Milky Way galaxy of 250 billion stars). It is about 45.9 million light-years away. There is a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core and has an estimated mass of 24 million solar masses.

I took this image on the night of May 20, 2019. The temperature was a warm 80°F when I started and the sky was about 8.5 (on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is crystal clear) but after about 50 minutes, the seeing conditions began to deteriorate and most of the subframes after that were rejected. With the warm temperatures, there is a lot of camera noise that not even the dark frames could eliminate (but that will soon be rectified as a new Altair Hypercam 294C Pro TEC camera is on the way).

The Techy Stuff:
Telescope: Celestron 11" Edge HD with the Starizona's HyperStar HD at f/2
Camera: Altair HyperCam 183C
Binning: 2x2
Format: RAW12 FITS
Filter: None
Subframe Exposure: 60 seconds at gain 600
Number of Subframes used: 64
Darks, Bias & Flat Frames: 20 ea
Guiding: PHD2 ... RMS Error: 0.22px
Capture Software: Sharpcap Pro v 3.15220
Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
Post processed in PixInsight and Photoshop CC
Sky Condition: 7.5 (Scale of 0-10)
Temperature: 80°F
Location: My Backyard, Savannah, GA, USA

---

Return to Pat Prokop's Heavenly Backyard Astronomy Page