Photo of the Week for August 28, 2015

Deep-sky aficionados are very familiar with M27, also known as the Dumbell Nebula thanks to its telescopic appearance. To some it looks more like an apple core. But there’s much more to M27 than meets the eye, as illustrated by this highly detailed image by Sooke, British Columbia, astrophotographer Steven Martin. With his camera and telescope, he was able to capture all kinds of delicate features largely invisible to the naked eye.

For this very deep M27 portrait, Martin used a Starlight Xpress Trius SX-694 monochrome CCD camera attached to a 8-inch Astro-Tech AT8RC Ritchey-Chrétien astrographic telescope to record a total of 20 hours exposure through both hydrogen-alpha and OIII filters (10 hours per filter).