On our recent trip to the fabulous dark skies of Dell City, Texas, I mostly tried to image things that would be difficult to capture from my light-polluted driveway at home.  However, a couple of those objects weren’t visible at sunset, so I snuck in some brighter objects as well.

NGC 7293 also called the Helix Nebula or Eye of God Nebula is a planetary nebula – the gases expelled from a star before it becomes a white dwarf, lit up by that star.  It’s located in the Milky Way, approximately 655 light years away, and it’s approximately 2.5 light-years across.  It’s estimated to be 10,600 years old.  Its apparent size is 25 arcminutes, and it has an apparent magnitude of 7.6.  

I’d imaged NGC 7293 last year, and I’d even posted a single 3 minute shot, but I’d never gone back and really processed it.

I processed the data from this year, and then went back and added in the data from last year.  Which version do you like better? I think I actually like the 2023 only version better.

Either way, this shows that less than an hour and a half of data was sufficient time to generate a decent image of this neat object with dark skies.

This is a particularly spectacular planetary nebula, and even last year it made me want to try to image more. Isn’t our galaxy amazing?  

Camera geek info:

• Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 3 minute exposure, ISO 1600
• Intervalometer
• Williams Optics Zenith Star 73 III APO telescope
• Williams Optics Flat 73A
• iOptron CEM40
• Dell City, Texas Bortle 2-3 dark skies

Frames:

• October 28, 2022
  • Run 1
    • 10 3 minute lights
• October 11, 2023
  • Run 2
    • 17 3 minute lights 
    • 30 0.01 second flats
    • 30 0.01 second flat darks

Processing geek info:

• PixInsight
• BlurXterminator
• NoiseXterminator
• StarXTerminator
• Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch