Photo of the Week for October 2, 2015
When we look up at the magnificence of the summer Milky Way, we see stars — lots and lots of stars. But there’s also plenty of dust and gas dotting our galaxy. Unfortunately, many of these nebulas are very faint and best appreciated through images, like this one by Marc Ricard. His photo shows a vast field of nebulosity in Cygnus that includes Sharples 101 (Sh2-101), at lower right. The region is found along the neck of the Swan, just northeast of magnitude-3.9 star Eta Cygni.
Ricard recorded this image from Oak Heights, Ontario, with a Canon EOS 60D DSLR camera attached to a Takahashi FSQ-106ED refractor telescope. The final photo is comprised of a stack of 94, 180-second frames combined digitally.
