• Messier 97 in Ursa Major, the Owl Nebula
    • M97 in Ura Major, Owl Nebula
    Annotated image
  • Messier 97, M97 or the Owl Nebula, is a planetary nebula
  • formed by the death of a star similar to our own sun.
  • The central star has ~60% solar mass but has 100
  • times the luminosity of our sun.  M97 has
  • a radius of ~0.1 ly, and is 2.0 kly from us.
  • Hover over the image for an annotated view.
  • Date:  8 March 2026
  • FOV:  cropped to 15' × 10'; M97 is about 3.3'
  • Rotation:  −90.256°
  • Telescope:  Celestron C14 SCT (3910mm, f/11)
  • Starizona SCT Coma Corrector/Reducer (2652.5mm, f/7.5)
  • Guiding:  ZWO183 MM
  • Computer:  ASIair plus 256GB
  • Mount:  iOptron CEM120
  • Camera:  ZWO ASI2600MC Pro Cooled (0°C) Color CMOS with gain 100
  • Pixel size:  3.76 μm
  • Resolution:  0.292 arcsec/pixel
  • Filter:  Optolong UV/IR
  • Stacking:  thirty-eight 300 second frames using PixInsight
  • Calibration frames: 20 dark, 20 flat, 20 dark flat
  • Total Time:  3 hours 10 minutes
  • Processing:  Pixinsight – SPCC, DBE, SPCC, BlurXT, NoiseXT → Linear
  • HTS, GHS, MStr, PixelMath MStr + GHS + HST → Stars,
  • Linear, StarXT, HTS, GHS, MStr,
  • PixelMath MStr + GHS + HST → Starless
  • HDRMST_6_PhLm,
  • PixelMath ~(~Starless*~Stars) → Blend
  • Location:  Darling Hill Observatory in Vesper, NY