This incredible area in the night sky is dominated by this deep sky object – the Veil Nebula, which is a supernova remnant; a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. This image captured the western components of this supernova remnant, which are “The Witch’s Broom Nebula” (NGC 6960) at bottom left, and “Pickering’s Triangle” (NGC 6979) at top. The Eastern Veil Nebula (NGC 6995) is not in this image but lies about two degrees to the east.
It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant, many portions of which have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. At the time of explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and would be visible in the daytime. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon). This incredible object lies 2,400 light-years away from Earth, so the light photons that were caught in this image left the nebula over 2,400 years ago.
This is a HOO image, in that the Hydrogen Alpha channel was assigned to Red, and the Oxygen III channel was assigned to both Blue and Green. Note that the Sulfur channel was also assigned to Red (SHOO?). This yields a bi-color image, but would be a reasonable approximation of the true color of the object.
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Image Info
- Imaged from the KPO field in Saint Cloud, Florida (Ha), and from Key West, Florida (OIII & SII).
- Camera : ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
- Lens: Canon 100-400 f/5.6L lens, set to 386mm
- Mount: iOptron SmartEQ Pro
- Hydrogen Alpha: 11 subframes of 300s = 55 min integration, assigned to Red
- Sulphur II: 11 subframes of 300s = 60 min integration, assigned to Red
- Oxygen III: 12 subframes of 300s = 60 min integration, assigned to Green and Blue
- Total integration time: 175 min = 2.9 hours.
- Captured via ASIAir Pro automation
- Optical tracking via ASIAir automation, currently using ST4 mount control via the ASI120MM-S guide camera
- Separate channels stacked and HOO integrated in Astro Pixel Processor
- Image cropped, stretched, and noise processed in Nebulosity
- Final processing in Aperture