This picture is something I have to apologize for. Actually it is just a by-product of the annual 61 Cygni shooting I regularly do to capture the movement of "fixed stars" close enough to our solar system. But after having completed the main job of the clear evening in late October 2022 I gave the Saturn nebula a closer look and tried some imaging tests. Yes, I should have taken more frames to manage the background noise, but I did not expect that the moderate 30 minutes total exposure eventually yielded a result good enough for publishing...

This planetary nebula was discovered by William Herschel in 1782 and is one of the first objects of the class described in further detail by Lord Rosse who gave the nebula its nick-name. In sufficiently large telescopes the nebula resembles a faint image of the ringed king of planets, but in mine it took me quite a series of single, relatively short exposures to manage the brightness of the object together with its low altitude - associated with poor seeing under central european skies.

The "Saturn nebula" is defeinitely the one object in this class which most obviously justifies the name "planetary nebula". The jets extending sideways resemble Saturn's ring structure close to the time point when the earth is crossing the ring plane. Although the apparent size in arcseconds is slightly more than Saturn, the nebula is considerably small. The central star cannot be resolved by an 8" telescope, but the two differetly bright shells are clearly separated from each other if you watch the picture at higher resolution. But regardless of how much details may be visible, this nebula, which is less than half the size of the ring nebula M 57, will always stay a challenge for any astrophotographer with mid-sized equipment...