Veil Neb (EAST) NGC 6992 & NGC 6979 Pickering's Triangle

[TakMan]

Tuesday>Wednesday 1st-2nd July 2014

Quite amazed I remembered how to use the imaging gear as it's been so long (over six months as I've been doing some visual and sketching instead with friends - that's just so I could play with my new Nova Hitch mount!**)... a few glitches along the way as to be expected, but better to iron them out on a night that wasn't 'really' clear... (quite murky from the heat of the last few days I suppose), but it's a start....

Veil Nebula (EAST) NGC 6992, Caldwell 33, aka the Bridal Veil.

A measly 11x 600sec sub exposures using a 7nm Baader Ha filter with an SBIG 8Mp STF-8300M mono camera on the FSQ-106ED + focal reducer (f/3.6).

Captured with Equinox Image that I helped Beta Test on a MacBook Pro.

Still got the Lodestar hooked up for guiding (in PHD) as the ST-i is still in it's box after coming back from its warranty repair over in the States...

Aligned and stacked in Nebulosity (dark and flat frames) and quickly processed in Photoshop CS5 to see what I'd captured!

The Veil Nebula is a beautiful display of intertwining strands and folds 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.

The expelled remnants of this supernova can be seen strewn all about the region on long exposure photos, but it is the two brightest parts that are typically seen visually. The brighter, eastern portion can be spotted in binoculars from a dark site as a long curving hazy streak of light. I can confirm this as I've seen it from my B&B when I stop over in the week down in darkest Herefordshire using my cheapo, tripod mounted, 'Revelation' 15x70 binos!

Robert Burnham Jr. described the view of the eastern portion (NGC 6992) in six to eight-inch scopes as "looking like a miniature Milky Way in itself in the field. It appears as a faint curved arc like a ghostly white rainbow, over one degree in length."

In modern usage, the names Veil Nebula, Cirrus Nebula, and Filamentary Nebula generally refer to all the visible structure of the remnant, or even to the entire loop itself. The structure is so large that several NGC numbers were assigned to various arcs of the nebula.

Not shown here is the The Western Veil (also known as Caldwell 34), consisting of NGC 6960 (better known as the "Witch's Broom", "Finger of God",or "Filamentary Nebula"), near the foreground star 52 Cygni.

NGC 6979 is the fainter triangular nebulosity to the far right of this picture - 'Pickering's Triangle'. Pickering’s Triangle goes by a number of aliases, including Pickering’s Wedge, Fleming’s Triangular Wisp, and Simeis 3-188.

Pickering's Triangle is much fainter, and has no NGC number (though 6979 is occasionally used to refer to it). It was discovered photographically in 1904 by Williamina Fleming of the Harvard Observatory while examining photographic plates of the area (after the New General Catalogue had been published), but credit went to her boss, astronomer Edward Charles Pickering, the director of her observatory, as was the custom of the day.

The faint extension to upper left of NGC 6979 is NGC 6974. This one was separately cataloged by Lawrance Parsons in 1873.

NGC 6992 is actually only the upper part of the bright nebula to the left, with the lower part of the brighter area designated as NGC 6995. Both NGC 6992 and 6995 are named the Network Nebula. It was John Herschel who assigned it two different numbers in 1825.

The faint lower extension to that nebula is IC 1340. This one was cataloged by Safford in 1866.

Something to add to hopefully over the next few months - work, wife and weather permitting!

Hi res version here - warts and all: http://astrob.in/full/105502/0/

Clear skies,

Damian

**TEC140 now on order for delivery Jan/Feb 2015 and the TSA going to my observing buddy... will I have to change my 'name' to Tak-TEC-Man!?

[TakMan]

100% screen grabs of a softer process...

Started this time with a DDP stretch in Nebulosity, pre-Photoshop.

Pleased overall with the outcome, especially considering the prevailing conditions when captured - just need some more subs to subdue the noise levels now, etc...

Damian