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Astrophotography

Summer Astro

I had a few pretty good nights, I put in some hours, staying up to around 2 AM. That gave me about 3-4 hours of shooting time each night, assuming everything went smoothly. I lost some time the first night because the guide scope had lost focus and it was difficult getting it back in focus.

I spent most of my time on this, the Crescent Nebula. This is the first time I’ve tried it with the IDAS Nebula Booster filter and it sure made a difference. For the first time I can see the bluish light emitted from oxygen around the nebula. Even better, at the bottom, slightly right of center, is the rarely imaged Soap Bubble Nebula. It wasn’t even discovered until 2007, by an amateur astrophotographer. It is a very faint planetary nebula.

Here’s some info on the Crescent Nebula from Wikipedia:

The Crescent Nebula (also known as NGC 6888, Caldwell 27, Sharpless 105) is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, about 5000 light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1792. It is formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 (HD 192163) colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant around 250,000 to 400,000 years ago. The result of the collision is a shell and two shock waves, one moving outward and one moving inward. The inward moving shock wave heats the stellar wind to X-ray-emitting temperatures.
This is M16, also known as the Eagle Nebula, which harbors the structures known as the ‘Pillars of Creation”, made famous by photos taken from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. I’ve done this before but a long time ago, before I had guiding tools and the new filter.
A cropped view with a larger view of the Pillars of Creation. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions. The Eagle Nebula lies in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.

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