The next few images were taken with an unusual system.  I used a general purpose color digital camera, the Nikon Coolpix 990, viewing the eyepiece of a pair of 10x70 binoculars, and the entire arrangement was mounted on a Meade LX-200 10-inch telescope for sidereal tracking during the exposures.

Figure 1.  With the Nikon Coolpix 990 digital camera attached to the 10x70 binoculars, we get this 3 times "closer" view of the southern part of Lyra.  The cross hairs are centered on the location of the Ring Nebula, or M57, whhich is faintly visible. [2000.06.24, 8.2 mm focal length, eight 8-second exposures, with dark exposures subtracted to remove pixel artifacts. Since the Coolpix has an aperture of only 3.3 mm when set to the 8.2 mm focal length, the effective aperture of the binoculars was reduced to 33 mm.]
 

Figure 2.  A 5 times zoomed version of the previous image, and greatly contrast enhanced, with 4 bars showing the location of the Ring Nebula (M57) - a barely discernible green "smudge" in this image.  M57 has a visual magnitude of 9.7, so the Coolpix is almost reaching to magnitude 10 using this binocular set-up.  The green color is produced by gas that glows at specific wavelengths.

Figure 3.  This is an average of another set of 8 exposures, each 8 seconds, with dark exposures subtracted (to remove pixel artifacts), using a cheap ($40) 10x50 binocular and improved guiding (obtained 2000.06.27).  It shows more clearly the "ring" structure of M57.  Due to the lack of light the greeness is not apparent.  This may be close to the limit that can be achieved using the Nikon Coolpix 990 camera and a cheap binocular.

Figure 4.  The Nikon Coolpix 990 was attached to a Meade LX200 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a 1-inch FL eyepiece for a series of four 8-second exposures, which were averaged to obtain this image (after subtracion of dark exposures to remove pixel artifacts), July 10, 2000.  The green color of the ring planetary nebula is apparent, as is the ring structure.  The scale is larger than the previous image, so star correspondences cannot be made.

This site opened:  June 25, 2000.  Last Update:  April 29, 2001