This is 40 minutes of data on the Ring Nebula (Messier 57) that I captured back at the beginning of May with Matt (although I believe he fell asleep on the floor for this one). It consists of eight five-minute frames captured with the QSI through the Meade 14".

I'll be the first to admit that I am deficient at working with nebula (for some reason I find galaxies more straightforward), so it took me a couple tries through this to find something that I could settle on. I'm not quite happy but I think I can settle with this version due to the structure that I caught on the ring itself and intensity variations in the core region. The variations in the core initially surprised me, and I thought they were a processing artifact until I verified against a few Hubble images for reference. The colour balance is a little off or there wasn't enough total integration to get a real lock on it but I'm sure there will be opportunity to address this with some more data over the summer. I found the largest challenge with this image was to bring out the spiral on the right of the frame without blowing the brightness of the right out of proportion. Balancing these issues unfortunately means there is still quite a bit of signal from the ring I didn't stretch, but my tests with it didn't show additional detail so I left it as is.