I’ve been trying to image the Helix Nebula for 2 years. This is probably the most challenging object for me. It’s extremely low and the window of opportunity is very short. The last two years I usually had bad skies or other obligations so I was really hoping to get a shot this year and last night I got lucky.

Here’s about 2 hours of noisy data, shot at 17 degrees altitude right above some houses, processed as best as I could on this wonderful planetary nebula. We’re lucky this thing is very bright which means little integration time is needed.

While I was waiting for the Helix to be high enough to start imaging I captured two hours on the Eagle Nebula which was suprisingly good data as well.

This has been an amazing summer and I’m already looking forward to autumn.