Location / Date

Zellerndorf, March/April 2020

Telescope / Mount / Guiding

ASA 10" Astrograph, ASA 3" Wynne-Corrector (focal length 910mm)
ASA DDM60, no guiding

Camera / Exposure

Moravian G3-16200, Astrodon filters

Lum 74 x 10min, R 26 x 5min bin2x2, G 28 x 5min bin2x2, B 30 x 5min bin2x2
Hα 18 x 20min, OIII 18 x 20min

Total exposure time: 31h 20min

Processing

PixInsight, Fitswork, Photoshop

Notes

Messier 97 (M 97) is a planetary nebula located in the Ursa Major constellation. The nebula is approximately 2000 light years away from earth, the estimated age is about 8,000 years. It was nicknamed as Owl Nebula because of its appearance in telescopes, which reveal two dark patches that look like the eyes of an owl.
The nebula formed when a dying Sun-like star ran out of hydrogen fuel, collapsed from a red giant to a white dwarf, and ejected its outer envelope. The expelled material is now heated by the radiation of the central white dwarf, producing the nebula’s glow. The nebula has been gradually expanding and will completely disperse into space over the next several thousand years, while the white dwarf will cool and fade away over the next several billion years.

Messier 108 is a barred spiral galaxy and nicknamed as the Surfboard Galaxy. It is an isolated member of the Ursa Major Cluster of galaxies in the local Virgo Supercluster, a Supercluster that contains at least 100 galaxy groups and clusters, including the Virgo Cluster and the Local Group, which contains our Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy.

HCG 50 (Hickson Compact Galaxy Group) is a very faint group of 5 distant galaxies (between mag 18.4 and mag 19.7) about 1.8 billion light years away.