Barnard 103

Barnard 103, aka LDN 497, is a dark nebula about 3 degrees west northwest of M11 and is darkness class 6 the darkest classification. In fact after my normal stretch that turns background at this declination to about 20 in Photoshop, it was still zero in all frames. Now that's dark.

This seems about all agreement I can find about this object. Many catalogs list it as 1 degree across yet it easily fits my much smaller field. The web page http://www.dvaa.org/AData/Barnard.html lists it as only 4 minutes across. Now that's way too small! The Sky 6 shows a blue blob of just about the right size of 40'. But draws it a bit less than 30' across which is a good match to my image field size.

The small round dark blob to the lower right is LDN 495 while the one to the lower left is LDN 498.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick

Rick,

this dark nebula is a good fit for your FOV.
And it is nice dark too :-)

Stefan