Here's one more picture... one that I almost threw out after looking at it on my computer. In fact, I had deleted it, but when looking at the pictures on my camera, I saw a planetary nebula! The brightness on the computer was not high enough to see it. This is the Ring Nebula, the last one I photographed, and was about 36" of exposure on my Nikon at 1600 ISO with noise reduction 'on'. Notice the slight star trails, betraying my less than perfect polar alignment. But hey, I'm happy with it as my first picture of a planetary nebula. This looks very much like a blue halo I saw near Polaris last year. What I've learned is that such things can be caused by dust particles in the optics. In this case, I know it's real because 1) The ring nebula is what I was trying to photograph and 2) the star patterns near it check out with what my SkyTools 3 program shows.
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