M27 is a remarkable and beautiful planetary nebula located in Vulpecula. Despite their name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They were named originally because their discoverers observed them visually and they did not appear as stellar point sources, but rather as small diffuse objects that resembled the outer planets in our solar system such as Uranus and Neptune when seen in a telescope. Planetary nebula are shells of gas shed by stars late in their life cycles after using up all of their nuclear fuel. The star then ejects a significant portion of its mass in a gaseous shell, which is illuminated by its extremely hot central star, which was just the core left from the original star. Our own star, the Sun, is expected to undergo the same process in a couple of billion years. Planetary nebulae do not last long at all in cosmic terms, the shell of gas expands and diffuses becoming invisible and the star turns into a white dwarf. M27's central star has a magnitude of 13.5 and is an extremely hot blueish dwarf with a temperature of about 85,000 K. The nebula itself, which extends to 15 arc minutes in size at it's faintest extensions, half the size of the full moon, is second in size only to NCG 7293, The Helix Nebula, in Aquarius. The Helix has a lower surface brightness though because of it's larger size.