C6, the Cat's Eye Nebula
8/2026
ASI2600MM Pro, 950mm, f/3.8,, 28h (R/G/B 3x1.9h, Lum: 2.2h, Ha: 6.4h, O3 14h)
The Cats Eye Nebula, or NGC6543, is a tiny yet quite bright planetary nebula in constellation Draco. Discovered by William Herschel in 1786, it is the first planetary nebula examined in 1864 by William Huggins using spectroscopy to discover, that the main brightness is created by ionized gas.
To be clear, the nebula is the tiny, elliptical core in this image, the outer regions are ionized atoms, which were ejected from the Wolf Rayet Star in the center. To resolve the core as in Hubble's image, I'd need a much larger focal length.
For more details regarding this fascinating object, I'll just refer the above linked articles on Wikipedia.
The special challenge to capture an image of this object is the intense brightness of the core in contrast to the rather dim outer perimeter of emission nebula. The core is brigt enough to outshine all the stars in this region and does generate quite prominent yet diffuse diffraction spice when using newtonian telescopes.
In order to present details of both the core and the outer nebulosity in a single image, I used a similar layering technique as described on my DRI page.
The Cats Eye Nebula is indeed quite small and the image above only a small crop of the whole image: