Cygnus X

[Knight of Clear Skies]

I had a go at making a composite of with of my images with some IR data from one of NASA's space telescopes. The idea was to show that a great deal of the activity in a star-forming region is hidden at visible wavelengths. Emission nebulae are often visible parts of much larger structures.

The image on the left is mine, a mix of Ha and RGB data taken with the Samyang 135mm f2. The image on the right uses data from NASA's WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, with a blend of the two in the middle.

Field of view is about 9x9 degrees so it covers a large swathe of sky in central Cygnus. The IR image shows good coherence with the visible image in the star-forming regions around the Cygnus wall and head of the Pelican. As I understand it, Ha emission comes from a relatively thin shell, as only a small depth of materiel provides shade from the ionizing source. I'll have a go at making a crossfade video to show this more clearly.

At lower right is the Cygnus X complex, the largest known star-forming region in the Milky Way. It shows little coherence with the visible-light image as it's behind them, largely hidden behind dust clouds. It contains the Cygnus OB2 & OB9 associations, the former is visible as a dim star cluster but without the intervening dust some of its stars would be nearly as bright as Deneb. This map shows the extent of Cygnus X if you keep scrolling up past the NA & Pelican (Sh2-117), and past the much more distant Butterfly (Sh2-108):

http://gruze.org/galaxymap/map_2020/

Also of interest is the bright star at bottom-middle in the IR image, but almost invisible in RGB. This is NML Cygni, a red supergiant and one of the largest known stars.

Hope you find this of interest.

This image makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Knight of Clear Skies

[Mr Spock]

Very nicely done, and very interesting too 👍

[Fegato]

Nice one - thanks for the info, very interesting!

[ollypenrice]

Excellent and something new. Great stuff.

Olly

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Thanks all. There are a few other targets I think should make good optical/IR composites so I'll be have a go at a couple more sometime.