Anywhere Is, project SWANS, day 4: To the east from Deneb

there the stars are born from the Cocoons.

 

Covering the large portion of the Milky Way, which is the disk subsystem of our Galaxy, constellation Cygnus houses a lot of gaseous and dusty entities, both bright and dark. This image features among others the tiny bright Cocoon nebula (IC 5146/ Caldwell 19) which is a star formation region and much more prominent dark filament of Barnard 128 (the Snake nebula).

 

2048 size is quite viewable :)

 

Aquisition time: 10-11.08.2013 between 23:45 and 01:30 MSK (UTC+4)

Equipment:

Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 macro USM lens and Baader Planetarium 2" UHC filter mounted in front of the lens via step-down ring attached to Canon EOS 60D running Magic Lantern 2.3 firmware override riding on Vixen Polarie tracking platform over photo-tripod (alltogether codenamed "Anywhere Is, SWANS configuration").

Aperture 21,4 mm

Focal length 60 mm

Tv = 60 seconds

Av = f/2.8

ISO 4000

Exposures: 58 (plus 27 dark frames and 10 offset frames plus 2 fake flat-field frames).

Processing: Contrast was set to "linear" for all images in Canon DPP and 16-bit outputs were fed to DSS and stacked in Maximum Enthropy mode.

16-bit stacking result was processed in Photoshop with AutoContrast and Levels (namely gamma was set to 3,5) and Curves (skewed sigmoid curve was applied).

Note: I had to crop away some portion at the bottom of the image. The stars were really ugly there.

Done