Photo of the Week for November 4, 2016

Although it’s a prime target of the summer night sky, you can still enjoy viewing M27 on the early evenings of November. Best known as the Dumbbell Nebula, M27 is among the biggest and brightest of all planetary nebulas. Indeed, the luminous Dumbbell is one of the few planetaries reasonably easy to spot in binoculars.

This image of M27 by Quebec astrophotographer Jacques Demers was two years in the making. He used a Atik 428EX colour CCD camera to acquire the original colour data in 2014, which he supplemented with additional narrow-band information (H-alpha and O-III) recorded this past September with a SBIG ST-10XME CCD camera. The one constant was the Takahashi TOA-130NF 130mm (5.1 inch) refractor telescope he used throughout.