CKemu
Blue Moon Veil
Once in a "Blue Moon"...
Actually managed to get clear skies, a night off, the following day of to recover and almost no breeze!
The Veil Nebula and 52 Cygni
From Wikipedia:
The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop (radio source W78, or Sharpless 103), a large but relatively faint supernova remnant. The source supernova exploded some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) data supports a distance of about 1,470 light-years.
52 Cygni is a triple star system in the northern constellation of Cygnus with a combined apparent magnitude of 4.22. The brighter component is a probable spectroscopic binary that may consist of two similar stars; these are evolved giant stars with a combined stellar classification of G9.5III.
Session:
Lets be honest, British summers are a myth, something we like to think we have, but really don't. In this country it's an extended spring with occasional warm days, when BBQs are frantically dusted off. So for it to be a clear night, with occasional thin hazy high cloud, barely any breeze and my evening off, was truly a "Once in a Blue Moon" experience.
Whilst a bad pun, it was indeed this years "Blue Moon", with it being 99.6% illuminated and Facebook littered with blue tinted images, with people expecting it to actually be blue in colour...
So despite this source of illumination washing out the sky, I decided to experiment; could narrowband filters cut out enough of the glare to get "something". My target was the Western Veil nebula, something I'd never seen before, outside of Wikipedia. It's easy to find, if you know the constellation of Cygnus, you look for a bright star tucked below it's body and near it's wing, visible to the naked eye, it's a no-brainer to find.
After finding it and getting my guiding set up, I tested a quick 120s sub frame, saw details popping in to view and set up for 12 minute subs, the longest I'd ever attempted, after boiling a kettle, making a coffee and pacing around the garden looking up, the exposure came in, and I knew, that despite that Moon, I might just have something, it was tantalising and always exciting to see something new.
After two hours of capturing Ha data, I switched over to OIII and started a run of 10 x 12 minutes, another two hours would have to pass before I had two even data sets, but more and more thin cloud would wander in to my field of view, that and the Moon that had barely bothered the Ha data was taking the contrast right out of the OIII data, I presume due to more blue light being scattered about.
The session completed and the Sun started to rise, so I packed up and started processing, I noticed that in the four hour period the image had gradually shifted right and rotated by a few degrees, my polar alignment needs work, but I can honestly say, I'm one sleepy but extremely happy amateur astrophotographer.
Technical Data:
Telescope: Meade LX90 8" SCT
Additional Optics: Meade f/6.3 focal reducer/field flattener (over corrects this rig)
Camera: ATIK414ex Mono with ATIK EFW2
Filters: Baader Narrowband Ha (7nm), OIII
Guiding: Orion ST-80 with Starshoot Autoguider (PHD2 Guiding Software)
Processing: Deep Sky Stacker, Photoshop.
Subs: All binned 1x1, 720s exposures (12 minutes), Total imaging time, 4 hours.
Ha: 10
OIII: 10
No flats, No Bias, No Dark.
About the Image:
The image is a square crop of both Ha and OIII data stacked to produce a loosely "true colour" image of an extremely tiny portion of this massive nebula, indeed it would take many nights of imaging just to get the entire Western Veil imaged, yet alone the greater Cygnus loop. This image was made over a cup off coffee straight after the imaging session, so whilst it's a first attempt at working with the data, I feel it's a good enough start to show.
Some sharpening was applied to the image, just to emphasis the structure, but beyond the normal histogram stretching and curves, little more was done to the image.
Blue Moon Veil
Once in a "Blue Moon"...
Actually managed to get clear skies, a night off, the following day of to recover and almost no breeze!
The Veil Nebula and 52 Cygni
From Wikipedia:
The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop (radio source W78, or Sharpless 103), a large but relatively faint supernova remnant. The source supernova exploded some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) data supports a distance of about 1,470 light-years.
52 Cygni is a triple star system in the northern constellation of Cygnus with a combined apparent magnitude of 4.22. The brighter component is a probable spectroscopic binary that may consist of two similar stars; these are evolved giant stars with a combined stellar classification of G9.5III.
Session:
Lets be honest, British summers are a myth, something we like to think we have, but really don't. In this country it's an extended spring with occasional warm days, when BBQs are frantically dusted off. So for it to be a clear night, with occasional thin hazy high cloud, barely any breeze and my evening off, was truly a "Once in a Blue Moon" experience.
Whilst a bad pun, it was indeed this years "Blue Moon", with it being 99.6% illuminated and Facebook littered with blue tinted images, with people expecting it to actually be blue in colour...
So despite this source of illumination washing out the sky, I decided to experiment; could narrowband filters cut out enough of the glare to get "something". My target was the Western Veil nebula, something I'd never seen before, outside of Wikipedia. It's easy to find, if you know the constellation of Cygnus, you look for a bright star tucked below it's body and near it's wing, visible to the naked eye, it's a no-brainer to find.
After finding it and getting my guiding set up, I tested a quick 120s sub frame, saw details popping in to view and set up for 12 minute subs, the longest I'd ever attempted, after boiling a kettle, making a coffee and pacing around the garden looking up, the exposure came in, and I knew, that despite that Moon, I might just have something, it was tantalising and always exciting to see something new.
After two hours of capturing Ha data, I switched over to OIII and started a run of 10 x 12 minutes, another two hours would have to pass before I had two even data sets, but more and more thin cloud would wander in to my field of view, that and the Moon that had barely bothered the Ha data was taking the contrast right out of the OIII data, I presume due to more blue light being scattered about.
The session completed and the Sun started to rise, so I packed up and started processing, I noticed that in the four hour period the image had gradually shifted right and rotated by a few degrees, my polar alignment needs work, but I can honestly say, I'm one sleepy but extremely happy amateur astrophotographer.
Technical Data:
Telescope: Meade LX90 8" SCT
Additional Optics: Meade f/6.3 focal reducer/field flattener (over corrects this rig)
Camera: ATIK414ex Mono with ATIK EFW2
Filters: Baader Narrowband Ha (7nm), OIII
Guiding: Orion ST-80 with Starshoot Autoguider (PHD2 Guiding Software)
Processing: Deep Sky Stacker, Photoshop.
Subs: All binned 1x1, 720s exposures (12 minutes), Total imaging time, 4 hours.
Ha: 10
OIII: 10
No flats, No Bias, No Dark.
About the Image:
The image is a square crop of both Ha and OIII data stacked to produce a loosely "true colour" image of an extremely tiny portion of this massive nebula, indeed it would take many nights of imaging just to get the entire Western Veil imaged, yet alone the greater Cygnus loop. This image was made over a cup off coffee straight after the imaging session, so whilst it's a first attempt at working with the data, I feel it's a good enough start to show.
Some sharpening was applied to the image, just to emphasis the structure, but beyond the normal histogram stretching and curves, little more was done to the image.