A Beautiful Workout With a Dumbell

Another break from politics. Check out the image at the top.

The Dumbell Nebula, otherwise known as Messier-27, was discovered by the French astronomer by that name in 1764.  It can be easily seen with binoculars or a small telescope near the constellation Vulpecula, which is near Lyra overhead in early evenings in Utah. You can see why it picked up its common nickname. It is a planetary nebula, which means it developed from an expiring star that ballooned into a red giant and then shrunk into a white dwarf some 8000 years ago in relative terms. It has the shape of a prolate spheroid, which is a fancy name for an egg shaped object but with equal ends. We see it along the plane of its equator. The central star can be made out in the image. It is one of the most spectacular of the planetary nebulae.

Technical stuff: 10“ Meade LX200 GPS telescope; Meade Deep Sky Imager Pro I CCD camera; 30 minutes of luminance @ 30 seconds per frame; 10 minutes each of red, green, and blue filters again at 30 seconds per frame. Processed with NASA’s Fits Liberator, then combined in Photoshop 7 as a LumRedGreenBlue composite. Taken from my backyard in Sandy, Utah on the night of 20 October 2010.

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JP