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M 27, the Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula located about 1,200 light years from our solar system.

The Dumbbell lies within the constellation of Vulpecula, the fox. While it is one of the brightest of all planetary nebula it is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. In 1764 Charles Messier made it the twenty seventh object, M 27, of his famous catalog.  

This image was captured by Graham P. Smith of the California Institute of Technology in May, 2004.  He used the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch (5-meter) Hale Telescope with its Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRC).

The image was recorded in three near-infrared wavelengths: "J" centered at 1.250 microns, "H" at 1.635 microns, and "H2" at 2.120.   The different images were combined to make this color image.

WIRC operates at the prime focus (f/3.3) of the Hale Telescope and records a field of view that is 8.49 arc minutes on a side.  The camera was developed jointly by Caltech and Cornell University.  It features a 2048-square Rockwell Hawaii-II NIR detector manufactured by Rockwell Scientific in Camarillo, California.  

The research was based on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a collaborative agreement between the California Institute of Technology, its divisions Caltech Optical Observatories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (operated for NASA), and Cornell University.   

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