M57

This is a photo of M57 that I took from my front deck using a 130" f5.7 reflector and a Meade DSI CCD camera on Sep 29. It's a stack of 21 4sec exposures. The white spots are hot spots on the CCD.

The object is on the Messier list of 110 of the brightest deep-sky objects, thus its name, M57. It's a planetary nebula, so called because early astronomers thought they may be giant gaseous planets. They are actually much more distant remnants of slowly exploding stars. This particular nebula is about 2300 light-years away and is about 4' wide, or about 0.06deg. That makes it about 1.6 lt-yrs in diameter, which is about 9 trillion miles. Our Sun is believed to be of the size and composition that it will end its life in this manner. Planetary nebulae are rather short lived and this one is believed to have started it's expansion about 1500-1800 years ago.