Thursday night (Sept. 2, 2004) was another opportunity to do some more high resolution imaging. This time I shot
NGC 6543 - Cat's Eye Nebula. The exposures were all done with the 10" Mak-Cass at F22 mounted on the 1200 GTO.
Total exposure times were 800 seconds for L, 600 seconds for RGB. Seeing was not as good as on Monday night.
Best resolution was 1.7 arc sec FWHM on this image. I shot through high level thin clouds, so I was not able to
get any of the faint wisps of nebulosity surrounding this bright core area. One of my friends, Trent Kjell, will
be shooting this with a faster wide field setup, his 7"F7 refractor.

The image above is a reduced version of the full field with close-up in the upper corner. The second image shows
how really small this planetary is by comparing it to the Northern component of eLyra, which has a separation of
about 2.8 arc seconds. By that comparison, it measures about 10x13 arc second oval, less than 1/2 the size of
the Blue Snowball.

Roland Christen