North America Nebula

Wider…Wider…

 in Blog  tagged Butterfly Nebula / crescent nebula / cygnus / Deneb / North America Nebula / Pelican Nebula / Propeller Nebula / sadr

In my earlier attempt to capture the Spaghetti Nebula I found that the 200mm camera lens wasn’t quite wide enough.  And that a faster (lower focal ratio) lens would also be beneficial.  So I put an 85mm f/1.8 Nikkor lens (stopped down to f/2.8) on the QSI camera and tried again last night.  It didn’t work.  The moon was full last night, and even with a 3nm H-alpha filter, there was enough sky illumination to almost completely overpower the Spaghetti.  I’ll try it again when the Moon goes away, but I have to comment again on what this says about […]

A Swan of a Different Color

 in Blog  tagged ic1318 / narrowband / NGC7000 / North America Nebula / Sadr Region

Here are a couple of new images from the constellation Cygnus, the swan.  Both are fairly wide views (done with the WO Star71 telescope) and both are narrowband images with somewhat unusual color rendering.  First is the North America Nebula, NGC7000: I have to explain that you may be seeing something like the shape of the United States here, with the dark “hole” being the Great Lakes region, rather than the shape of North America.  But if you turn it clockwise 90 degrees the hole becomes the Gulf of Mexico and the entire continent is included. NGC7000 is one of […]