I am a little late in uploading this as, i have to admit, I have been struggling with motivation quite a bit lately.  This year has been clouded out almost continuously and even on those nights where there is a parting of the clouds it is only for a couple of hours before they roll back in.  All of which means that I can’t really get the data to do justice to the targets I do get to go after.  However that said, this has long been one of my “must have’ targets, so even if it is not able to be in a finished state yet it needs to go up 🙂

The data for this image was captured on the 16th September, the gods giving me a slightly late birthday present , which was the first night in months where the stars could be seen.  Unfortunately the clear skies only lasted for a couple of hours, or at least as clear as Jakarta gets, but it did finally matched up with a time when this beauty was up.

The Helix Nebula, otherwise known as the “Eye of God”, is located in the constellation Aquarius and is one of the closest planetary nebula to Earth, about 700 light years away. With an apparent size of 25 arcminutes it occupies slightly less of the sky than the full moon (29-34 arcminutes depending on orbit location) but is too faint to be seen by the naked eye.