Good for my first REAL attempt?

[Gino Arcari]

hi, i haven't been involved in astronomy for quite a while due to school work and this terrible UK weather! last night i finally had a chance to do some imaging, although, it was very confusing at first because the sky had changed quite a bit since i last went out. well anyway, i decided to image M27 and I'm very pleased with my results! what do you think? any tips would be great, 

[red dwalf]

can`t really fault it at all, sometimes people over expose the core and lose the little spot in the middle, also your stars look nice and round

[Gino Arcari]

Thanks! I stacked about 5images of 20sec exposures. Is the spot in the middle where the explosion happened, probably a really stupid question but I'm only 16 so have a lot to learn!

[soundwave]

Hey, that's a great pic in my opinion!

And yes, the center white dwarf star is responsible for that beauty 

M27 is what's called a "planetary nebula". But what caused it wasn't a supernova explosion (the star wasn't massive enough for that).. instead, it ejected its outer layers and contracted into a white-dwarf star.

If it interests you... Stars (like our sun) fuse together hydrogen atoms (which have 1 electron & 1 proton) into helium (which have 2 electron & 2 protons [and 2 neutrons, to help keep the protons bound]).

They can do it because as gravity tries to pull all that gas together, it gets hotter, which means fast-moving hydrogen atoms.. and if they smash hard enough, they can fuse together.

When that fusion happens, energy gets released, which resists gravity's best attempts to shrink it all down to a central point.. So now we have a certain sized ball of glowing hot gas in its "main sequence".

What happens when all the hydrogen atoms run out? ...there is no more energy being generated in the core to resist gravity, so the core of the star begins to contract, and it gets much hotter.. the outer layers of the star begin to expand and now that star is called a "red giant"... now as the core gets hotter, the helium atoms move faster and faster, and when the star gets hot enough it now starts to fuse Helium atoms together into heavier elements like Carbon & Oxygen.

But now the helium has run out, and the star's core contracts again.. This time, producing enough radiation energy to eject away the outer layers far away into space and produce a Planetary Nebula, and the star itself turns into a white-dwarf star (which will eventually fade away into a black-dwarf star)...

But if the star was much more massive, then things wouldn't end there... 

In massive stars, that core is able to get hot enough to continue the fusion.. Now fusing the core into Iron... and when the Iron core gets too massive, it can no longer support its own mass and the star collapses insanely fast, and the pushback causes a massive supernova explosion which blows almost all that material away into space, leaving behind a Neutron star (or a Black Hole, if the star was realllllly massive).

But this kind of thing is very fortunate for us, since the earth (and humans) are made out of Hydrogen, Oxygen, Carbon, Iron, etc... and those elements are being produced in stars   

[wxsatuser]

Thats quite good for a few short exposures.

[PeterCPC]

Great image - well done.

Peter

[sloz1664]

Great image for the amount of subs taken.

Onwards and upwards 

Steve

[Gino Arcari]

thanks everyone for your great comments

[tingting44]

loving it! and welcome back

[Gino Arcari]

thanks:)

[red dwalf]

very good for only 5 20 second exposures, go for longer if you can and you should be able to get some of the fainter red outer layer

[Astrosurf]

Excellent first job! Have a go at taking darks as well. You have very little noise in the image but the darks will clean it up. You can take darks while the camera is still attached to the scope by attaching the scope's dust cover, and then taking a few shots of the same length and ISO (I take about half to 3/4 as many as the lights). Or you can remove the camera and attach its lens cap and do the same. Darks need to be at as close to the same temperature as possible, so do them shortly after your lights, or at the end of the evening if the temperature hasn't changed much. When you stack in DSS it will save a master dark. People often use those for other imaging sessions of roughly the same temperature so they don't have to take darks each time. I've never done that so can't comment.

Alexxx

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Very nice, I'd be very pleased with that, especially with such a small amount of data. Looks like you've done a good job with the processing, did you perform some kind of noise reduction?

[Gino Arcari]

sorry guys, i meant to say that i did aprox 50 frames but must have miss typed....i counted them all and i did 44..ill be sure to try to do some darks next time! thanks for the advice! this is one of the frames straight out of the camera...

[Sandancer10]

Very good capture and imaging, keep it up.

[toxic]

very good M-27 especially for a first go