Planetary nebula Messier 27 is a classic beginner’s object: it’s very bright and you can capture a good amount of details in the core with modest telescopes and short integration times. More advanced photographers can use narrow band filters and long integration times to reveal the large but much fainter extensions of this dying star.
I’ve photographed M27 in the past, but this year I wanted to make a very deep, high-resolution image with my large Newtonian telescope. The main challenge was going to be the dynamic range of the scene: the core is so bright that it almost saturated my camera sensor in a 5-minute narrowband exposure, while the outer ‘wings’ were barely detectable above the background sky!
Finding a way to compress these different intensities in a visually pleasing way took a lot of attempts and reworks. My intent was to show the viewer a bright red-green apple core around the central white dwarf star, and a gradual decrease in intensities of the different gaseous shells as you move away towards the edge of the two wings.
I combined both short RGB exposures and deep data from both OIII and H-alpha filters for a total exposure time of almost 20 hours.
This was one of the first objects that I captured with the ASI1600MM-Cool
back in the Summer of 2017. The result from 2017 has long been one of my favorite images and processing the new 2022 data to an equal or better level proved to be really hard.
M27 bicolor + RGB stars 
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