Widefield Crescent in Ha

[Paxo]

Unexpected clear evening last night, and with the rich starfield of Cygnus overhead I decided to have a go at a previously untried nebula for me, NGC6888, the Crescent Nebula.  Due to the considerable light pollution here in the heart of industrial Tyneside, I've gone for my usual Hydrogen Alpha filtration, in this case a Baader 2" 7nm filter fitted within the adaptive optics unit.

Image is 10 stacked lights of 900 second duration giving 2.5 hours of total exposure, and calibrated with bias frames, flats (dark flats) and dark frames.  Imaged with SX-VR H36 through a Pentax 75 SDHF scope which gives a 3 arcseconds per pixel resolution giving a massive field of view of 4.16 x 2.78 degrees.  Optics mounted on an EQ8, guiding camera was a SX Lodestar activated through a SX-AO unit.

Guiding and image collection software was Maxim DL 6, stacking was done usig DSS, image tweaking was through PS CS3

Thanks for looking, Steve