The Eye of the Cat’s Eye Nebula with a Big Telescope

A false color image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula core

NGC6543 or Cat’s Eye Nebula, it’s the composition of 3 x 60 seconds Luminance + 60 seconds exposition in H-alpha taken with iTelescope.net T24 – 0.61m f/6.5 reflector and CCD SBIG ST-10XME.

This was mostly a test for me, I never used the H-alpha before and I wanted to see what is possible to get with just 60 seconds, but unfortunately the result wasn’t what I expected, the image in H-alpha had a really low signal, I didn’t consider the long focal ratio of the telescope, 60 seconds are not enough, at least 300 seconds should be used with this focal ratio. Also the Moon illumination at 60% has affected the result.

The core of the nebula is around 30 arcseconds, even though is not the prettiest photo, I still like to think how small the actual field of view is compared to other photos I made.

The full image 32′ x 32′

The actual field was much wider, but not that interesting, I found the galaxy NGC6552 not far from the nebula, I leave the image below.

NGC 6552

Name: NGC 6552
Coordinates: 18:00:07.21 +66:36:53.8
Redshift: 0.026492
Distance from Earth:  360 Million Ly
Velocity: 8000 Km/s
Size: 120000 Ly
image from CDS Portal

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