With beautifully pictured stars, Marc Ricard’s seamless four-panel mosaic of the Veil Nebula won Photo of the Week for October 16, 2021.
Located in the constellation Cygnus, the Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant, the source star of which is estimated to have erupted between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, and it has been expanding ever since. The nebula, the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop, includes individually-named portions, such as the Bat Nebula and Eastern Veil Nebula on the right, the Western Veil Nebula on the left, and Pickering’s Triangle at the bottom.
Ricard captured this image from Pointe-Claire, Quebec over the course of a couple months in mid-2020.
“The delicate tendrils of this object are quite faint and difficult to capture from my light-polluted backyard with conventional RGB filters,” Ricard wrote. “But not so with high contrast narrowband filters. Over a dozen nights, my little four-inch Takahashi refractor and QSI Camera followed this large object as it slowly moved across the sky and captured 51 20-minute exposures taken through Ha, Oiii and Sii filters for each of the four separate panes that were combined into this final image.”
Tim Trentadue’s Rosette Nebula captured our honourable mention this week.
Shooting from the North Frontenac Dark Sky Preserve December 3, 2019, Trentadue captured the nebula with 50-minutes of exposures for each filter in Ha, Oiii, Sii, and Baader.
He said he used a ZWO 1600 Pro cool Mono camera and a TS 130 Photoline at f/7.
“One of my favorite objects to photograph, I am drawn to it year after year,” he wrote. “This was a very cool night, but the seeing was very good and I was able to capture my most detailed image to date of the Rosette. Here is a close up of an area that I find fascinating. There are so many interesting structures here. I have tried to give a more natural-palette look to this image despite it being shot in narrow band.”
He said the image was captured using Sequence Generator Pro and was stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, while processing was done in PixInsight and Photoshop.
Prizes for the 2020-21 SkyNews Photo of the Week contest are sponsored by Sky-Watcher, Celestron, iOptron and The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Click here for more details on the prize packages that will be awarded to the best photos this year.
