My productivity for the past Winter (in terms of new astro-photos produced) was well below average, and Spring has not been kind either.  So I’ve been looking at old images to see if I could find some that might benefit from the new tricks I’ve learned in processing over the last few years.  I found these two objects, which both happen to be somewhat obscure nebulae in the constellation Cygnus.

The Tulip Nebula:

A closer view of the actual tulip shape (center) would make for a more colorful image, but I like the contrast of this gentle flower floating on a boiling cloud of hydrogen.  It’s about 6,000 light-years from Earth and contains a “microquasar”, Cygnus X-1, which is the location of one of the first suspected black holes.

The Propeller Nebula:

The Propeller is a pretty mysterious object as deep-space objects go.  There are no compelling theories for what produced this shape.  We don’t even have a good estimate of its distance from Earth.  And Wikipedia has no entry for the Propeller Nebula!