The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula in Lyra situated halfway between the stars Sulafat and Sheliak in Lyra. The nebula is a shell of gas shed by a star with mass similar to that of the sun at the end of its red giant phase. This leaves a white dwarf at the center. The nebula lies at a distance of 2.500 light-years and has been expanding for about 1600 years. Although most popular images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope or major ground-based observatories depict it as being very large, it is actually very small in the sky, being only 1.5 arc minutes in diameter. A zoomed in view is also posted on this website that resembles those popular images. The spiral galaxy below it is IC 1296 which lies 238 million light-years from Earth.

Exposures: L:R:G:B = 100:55:55:55 minutes = 4 hours, 15 minutes total exposure, completely unguided.