Messier object 57, the Ring Nebula, is in the constellation Lyra, high in the northern hemisphere sky during July and August. Look straight up for Vega, the fifth-brightest star in the sky, and near it you should find a parallelogram, or crooked rectangle. M57 lies between Beta and Gamma Lyrae, the corners farthest from Vega.

The field of view in 10 x 50 binoculars is about 6 degrees. The image is magnified by a factor of 10, and the objective lenses (the ones on the front) are 50 mm in diameter. In the dark, the pupils of your eyes open to a width of about 7 mm, so the 10 x 50s have about 50 times the light-gathering area.

The binoculars easily reveal that Epsilon Lyrae is more than one star. But as we center the view between Beta and Gamma, where M57 lies, we still can't see the ring. It's too faint to be seen without a telescope.

On a dark night, looking through an 8-inch f/6 reflector, we can finally see a small ring. Using a 20mm Plössl eyepiece, the field of view is about half a degree, the size of the full Moon, and the image is magnified by a factor of 60. The 8-inch mirror gathers 800 times as much light as the unaided eye.

An eyepiece with a shorter focal length would increase the magnification. But the atmosphere, the imperfections of the telescope, and the wave nature of light all place practical limits on the amount of useful magnification we can get. The maximum can vary widely. For me it's typically around 200x.

During a visit to the Vega-Bray Observatory in southern Arizona, I had my first experience with CCD imaging using their computer guided 20-inch f/10 Maksutov Cassegrain telescope. The larger aperture brightens the image and allows higher magnification. You can see the central star, which is a million times fainter than Vega.

The image I made really doesn't do justice to the view at the eyepiece, which had a resolution and a three-dimensional quality that made you feel like you were falling into the ring. Easily seeing the magnitude 15 central star was a real treat for someone accustomed to more modest apertures.

The Hubble Space Telescope uses a 94-inch f/24 primary mirror. M57 doesn't quite fit in the L-shaped 2.5 arcminute field of the Wide Field / Planetary Camera 2, so this image was assembled from exposures taken during two separate telescope pointings.

Hubble's mirror is pretty big, even by the standards of ground-based professional observatories, but its real advantage is that it's 400 miles above the blurring, distortion and light pollution of the air we have to look through on the ground.

The first three images are artist renderings of naked eye, binocular and amateur telescope views. The naked eye and binocular views were made with my star plotting program. The telescope view was drawn by hand, using images from the web-based SkyView virtual observatory as a reference.

The fourth image is a CCD photograph taken the night of July 7-8, 1999 at Vega-Bray through their 20-inch Mak. Since monsoon season had just begun in southern Arizona, we had to wait until after midnight for the sky to partially clear. The camera was an Apogee AP2 with a 1536 x 1024 Kodak KAF-1600 chip. It was controlled by version 4.05 of Axiom Research's MIRA Pro image processing and analysis software. This was a 40-second exposure with 3 x 3 binning and a gain of 32 electrons per count.

The Hubble image was taken by the HST WFPC2 on October 16, 1998 and released to the public January 6, 1999. See the Hubble Heritage Program's press release and information links. The WFPC2 Handbook is the technical reference used by astronomers to plan observing sessions with this instrument. I rotated the image in Photoshop so that it would match the orientation of my CCD image from Vega-Bray.

The color HST image is a composite of exposures taken through three filters, each of which only lets in the light of a single emission line from a specific ionized molecule. The image from each filter is assigned to the RGB color channel nearest the wavelength it passes.

To see the component filter images, load the color image into a program like Photoshop and look at the color channels separately. The filter wavelengths aren't too far from those of traditional RGB color primaries.

I no longer take the Menzel book into the field, since its binding has become somewhat fragile. It's also become a bit of a collector's item. The current edition, edited by Jay Pasachoff, is still a nice book, but it lacks the inspirational photographic charts of the 1962 edition.