Planetary nebula
Ring Nebula (M57)
In Lyra (Lyr) • Magnitude 9.7 • 1.4 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Ring Nebula pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
One of the most recognisable objects in the sky — a glowing smoke ring in Lyra, formed when a dying star puffed its outer layers into space about 10,000 years ago. The Ring Nebula is expanding at 20–30 km/s, and astronomers have measured it visibly growing larger across a century of photographs.
Ring Nebula at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M57, N 6720 |
| Type | Planetary nebula |
| Constellation | Lyra (Lyr) |
| Right ascension | 18h 53m 35s |
| Declination | +33° 01' 48" |
| Apparent magnitude | 9.70 |
| Surface brightness | 12.4 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 1.4 × 1.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 78° |
| Best imaging months | Mar, Apr, May |
How to image Ring Nebula
Ring Nebula sits in the constellation Lyra at right ascension 18h 53m 35s and declination +33° 01' 48". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a planetary nebula, Ring Nebula typically appears small and intense, so a long focal length and OIII or Ha narrowband filters bring out structure.