Image 1: NGC6826 The Blinking Nebula from Lac Teeples, November 12, 2023.
This is one of the smallest deep sky targets I have ever imaged. It is smaller than the planet Jupiter (~50 arcsec diameter) at 27 arcsec by 24 arcsec. That we see any features is amazing. The Eskimo Nebula is even smaller! The tricks we use to get detail of a bright planet like Jupiter don’t work for a dim object like this.
This is another planetary nebula, formed by an exploding star. In actual distance it is roughly 0.2 light years in diameter, so much smaller than the Small Dumbbell Nebula (1 light year). 0.2 light years is still quite a long distance.
The image is reasonably good, but a broad outer ring is not seen. The conditions may not have been right for this (sky transparency or seeing) but most likely this is because I only got 23 minutes of data! I observed for over an hour and more than half was garbage. The people who are capturing the outer ring of light are almost certainly capturing 10s or 100s of hours of data to do so.
I think the problems are partly an effect of using the 14” SCT with its insanely long focal length. A tiny vibration causes violent changes in the image. The weather was also imperfect – patchy cloud all night. Finally, it was one of the first cold nights and the frost was very heavy, with relative humidity firmly stuck at 100% all evening and night.
Image captured at Lac Teeples using the 14” SCT and the 6200MC camera. No filters used. Only 23 minutes of data was used, in 30 second subframes (shorter because of bad conditions). Focus was manually done because focus motor was frozen stuck.
Comments