M57, The Ring Nebula

Is described here in Wikipedia.

The Ring Nebula is a very well nknown example of a planetary nebula. This is a shell of ionized gas expelled into the surrounding interstellar medium by a red giant star, which was passing through the last stage in its evolution before becoming a white dwarf. It is about 2500 light years away from us.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 9 frames of 5 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software. This was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack them into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.