When it comes to astrophotography, there are hard to shoot nebulas and easy to shoot nebulas and today’s post features on of the easy ones.  Thanks to an incredibly rare night of perfect conditions, I spent a night in my observatory shooting whatever I could and as part of that sprint, I shot Messier 27 (M27), better known as the Dumbbell Nebula!

Thanks to the first good night out in my observatory in months a few weeks ago, I shot a number of different things from planets to globular clusters to nebulas like you have seen in my recent posts.  And don’t worry, I still have a bunch more to show you guys but today I wanted to show you my new shot of the Dumbbell Nebula!

The Dumbbell Nebula is a planetary nebula with a white dwarf in the center and is only 14,600 years old which is a lot younger than most things you see when looking through a telescope!

It is among my favorite nebulas to shoot because it is fairly bright and colorful with quite a bit of detail and set in front of a backdrop of a TON of stars!  It makes for a very photogenic nebula!

I don’t recall the exact technical specs for this photo but I’m thinking it was a series of a couple of dozen 90 second exposures that were stacked.  For those curious about my telescope setup that I used to capture this and my other space pictures, I suggest checking out my telescope setup for astrophotography post which I do keep updated whenever I have a change of equipment (which hasn’t happened in a long time for reasons I will go in to in another post perhaps).

Stay tuned as I still have more globular cluster and nebula pictures to share!

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