The Owl and the Surfboard

Last night we were lucky enough to have some clear skies in the early part of the evening and, although there was a nearly first quarter moon, I thought it was worth trying to carry on with some observations of objects in the constellation of Ursa Major. I was again using my 4 inch Celestron NexStar SLT which is relatively quick to get set up. My target was M97, the Owl Nebula, but I knew that it was possible to get another object in the field of view and this was M108, the Surfboard galaxy (a name I hadn't heard before until I looked it up). I started observing about 9.30pm with my Nikon D90 at prime focus and I was lucky to get both objects in the field of view first time. I was again using 30s ISO3200 frames and I was keen this time to monitor the sharpness of the images and to adjust the focussing from time to time if it looked like the stars were going out of focus. So there was a lot of standing around outside (until an hour later) gawping intermittently at the sky. I was fortunate because I did see a couple of sporadic meteors. One was slow and short in the direction of Leo and but the other was much more spectacular, heading east along the Hercules/Draco border. This latter one was bright but I only caught the last fraction of it and it was big enough to break up into two separate bits.

 

Here is my final image which resulted from 42 frames (21 minutes) stacked in DeepSkyStacker. M108 (NGC3556) is the 10.0 magnitude galaxy in the upper part of the frame. Below and slightly to the right is M97 (NGC3587) a magnitude 9.9 bluish planetary nebula that gets its owl name from what look like to dark circles of eyes on the disc. If you click on the image to get a better view you can just make out the central star which is a white dwarf in the making. The binned (x2) image has been processed in Photoshop and the colours enhanced for these two objects.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2021