Photo of the Week for June 30, 2018
High overhead on summer nights is Cygnus, the celestial swan—a constellation also more prosaically known as the Northern Cross. With the Milky Way running the full length of Cygnus, it’s not surprising that the region is rich with deep-sky treasures. One of the best known is the North America Nebula, much of which is shown in the photo above. Particularly conspicuous is the way the nebula suggests the west coast of Central America and Mexico—a feature informally dubbed the Cygnus Wall.
This nicely detailed narrow-band photo of the region was captured by Ian Barredo from his backyard in Regina, Saskatchewan. He used a ZWO ASI1600 monochromatic camera and a set of Astronomik filters with a Sky-Watcher 80mm ED refractor telescope (fitted with a 0.85× focal reducer) to obtain the data used for this image.
