Photo of the Week for August 18, 2018
Cygnus is home to several deep-sky treasures, including a couple of well known big, faint nebulas. One of these is the Veil Nebula complex—the remnant of a supernova thought to have exploded some 8,000 years ago. The nebula has two main components that partially define a ragged, 3-degree-wide loop. The western portion is catalogued as NGC6960 and is often referred to as the “52 Cygni section,” thanks to the 4.2-magnitude star seemingly embedded in the nebulous strand. The brighter, eastern arc is NGC6992/6995, shown in the photo below. A narrow-band eyepiece filter, dark skies, and a wide-field telescope make viewing the Veil fairly easy.
Greg Polanski of Kanata, Ontario, recorded this portrait of the Veil’s eastern section with a Sky-Watcher Black Diamond 150/750 6-inch f/5 reflector telescope (fitted with a Sky-Watcher coma corrector) and a QHYCCD QHY163C imaging camera. The final image combines a total of 2.8 hours of image data shot through a IDAS LPS D1 filter.
