Swan Nebula – M17

This star forming region, known as Swan Nebula (concentrate only on the brighter part of the nebula to see a checkmark and extend leftward to see a rough swan shape), is the home of hot red-glowing gas, dark lanes of dust & bright young stars. The Swan Nebula is quite large and massive as it contains roughly 1000 times the mass of our Sun. The bright central region is about 15 light years across lies about 5000 light years away toward the constellation of Sagittarius.

I recently imaged this using Stellarvue Refractor SV130 f/6.6 with a .8 reducer giving me a focal length of 687mm. There were just 6 luminance shots of 10 minutes each and 3 images of RGB of 5 minutes each, totalling to 105 minutes.

This image, shot in 2016 using AG Optical 10″ (with 1650mm focal length) was shot over 4 hours. (Luminance of 20 min each for 7 images, 7 images of each of colors for 5 minutes).

m16-09-2016-web

Leave a Reply