Messier 27, also known as the Dumbbell Nebula, is one of the most striking planetary nebulae in the summer sky. It lies in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of roughly 1,200 to 1,360 light-years from Earth. What appears here as a delicate, greenish glow in a dense field of stars is in fact the expelled outer shell of a dying Sun-like star, illuminated by the hot stellar remnant at its center.

For this image, I deliberately chose not to isolate Messier 27 too tightly. Instead, I wanted to show it embedded in the rich star field of the Milky Way. The nebula itself spans about 8 × 6 arcminutes in its brighter central region, while its much fainter outer halo reaches roughly 15 arcminutes across in deep images - about half the apparent diameter of the full Moon. At its distance, this corresponds to a physical extent of several light-years.

That scale is easy to lose in an image like this. The nebula looks small and almost fragile against the surrounding stars, yet it is an enormous structure of expanding gas, shaped by the final phase of stellar evolution. This contrast is what makes the scene so compelling to me: a single star at the end of its life, leaving behind a luminous trace of gas, color, and structure - surrounded by countless other suns.

The image was processed in an HSO palette, using the separate emission signals of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen to reveal different regions of the nebula. The bright turquoise-green areas are dominated by oxygen emission, while the reddish structures trace other parts of the expanding shell and its faint outer extensions. This kind of narrowband processing does not show the nebula as the eye would see it, but it helps make visible the delicate internal structure that would otherwise remain hidden.

Messier 27 is an object of transition. Not a violent stellar death like a supernova, but a slow departure - quiet, intricate, and unexpectedly beautiful.