M57 - Ring Nebula - Deep Sky Videos

hi there everyone today we're continuing our journey through the messier catalogue and just a reminder if you want to watch any previous videos we've done on Messier objects you can go to our website or we also have a playlist of all the Messier videos we've done and I'll put an annotation to that on the screen and a link below the video but today m57 which is an amazing object in its own right but also serves as a reminder that even the most accomplished astrophotographers started down at the bottom with grainy blurry images where the Sun Lee's astrophotography history dates back to July in 1991 astronomy now was the only UK magazine back then and they always had gallery pages in there so they invited astrophotographers to send in their their best efforts and back they're not just really started doing Astro photography and I sent them my first images taken with the first serious scope their head which was an image of m57 the ring nebula if we look at it here you can just about perhaps make out a faint fuzzy shape but if I stand as it seems laughable this of course was in the days of film so to even reproduce a result like that involved taking an image of the ring nebula on film they re copying the film using a high contrast copying film just to bring out the details within the ring nebula itself right from the early days it was a real eye-opener to see that people could take images of recognizable deep sky objects using off-the-shelf equipment obviously the American magazines the images were so much better because they were taken under very dark sky conditions out in the desert in the mountains for example I can't compete with that over here but to actually just get a recognizable image of the ring nebula for me was a fantastic thing and the fact that was published in the UK's only astronomy magazine was a great feeling own 57 is an object which is known as a planetary nebula in fact I think it's the one that gave its name to that particular class of object that was via William Herschel and when he first looked at it he described yet as a curiosity of the heavens because he looked at it and he thought it was a ring of stars but because it had the appearance of a planetary disc in the sky he coined that phrase planetary nebula which i think is quite fitting actually because it does look just like that you look between two stars at the bottom of a squashed diamond in the constellation of Lyra the stars of beta lyre e and gamma Y re about a third of the way along from beta towards gamma there is this tiny little disc like object at the moment we've pointed the telescope at the ring nebula in 57 and we taking a 60 second exposure with a hydrogen-alpha filter narrowband filter the way we'd normally image I mean I can control of this secret from indoors in this or comfor of study at home so can sit there in the warm and see exactly on my indoor computers what I'm seeing on the screen here and it's just a waiting game in the fact that you can set up an automated sequence made up of maybe just five or ten minute exposures but lots of them because then we can combine all those together do you sit there and watch it happening or do you go downstairs inspector well I don't watch x-factor but I have taken some very good images whilst having a nice hot bath it was actually discovered in 1779 by antoine dark here and he described it as a dull object like a fading planet and that's really unfair to call that dull objects it isn't at all this is basically the aftermath of a average sized star when it gets the point where it puffs off its outer layers into space as it's dying and what you're left with at the very heart of that system if you like is a white dwarf star and that's ionizing the gas of the outer layers as it's moving away it was thought for a long time that what we were looking at was actually a sphere in the sky so you know when you look through a balloon for example when it's blown up if you're looking through the middle of the balloon you're looking through two thin layers of rubber but if you look at the edge of the balloon you're looking through a more oblique thicker layer so it gives the impression of being more like a ring of rubber and it was that's what it was thought it was that it was a sphere and you were looking through the central bits there were thinner so that gave the impression of a hole in the middle but now it's thought that that's not actually the case it's more like you're looking down into a cylinder or perhaps a torus of material around the star so you're looking down the top of this torus and that's what's giving this ring impression there we've just taken our 60 second exposure so this would just be a fraction of the end result as you can see this is a fairly large CCD sensor on here the telescope is medium power in terms of its focal length equipment of a 2,000 millimeter telephoto lens so you can see the actual target itself is fairly small to produce a good image of this would not just be a 60 second exposure as we see here but maybe three hours worth of data which is all added together to produce a much stronger image any object that's the one if you look at a planetary nebulae you'd be quite unlucky to see one which doesn't show much in the way of structure we bring nebula for example as its name suggests got a dark hole in the center you've got other things like the owl nebula which is m97 that's got two holes in it and you've got m27 which is the dumbbell nebula which looks like an apple corer so they don't look like a normal planetary dish they always have some sort of structure which sort of gives it away some of them are much larger in the sky as well the ring nebula is actually quite a small example certainly another image that I've been involved with her more recently is the ring nebula once again but this time taken with the falx telescope here you can start to see this outer halo of the nebula and by using narrow band filters this time you can see a nice helical structure within get your ring of the ring nebula you come a long way well it's been a an interesting journey certainly this one was taken probably about three years ago and if you think that the original image was taken in 1991 just making you do it I do yeah it was a very big thing back then to have an image publish that was sort of taken in my back garden with my own equipment I mean it's fairly poor by today's standards but you have to start somewhere and you know I'm pleased with it it was a you started with m57 yeah

Channel: DeepSkyVideos

Views: 76,966

Rating: 4.9482102 out of 5

Keywords: M57, ring nebula

Id: _TovLkVHfZE

Length: 6min 53sec (413 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2012