Cygnus Widefield

It's been a while since my last publication. I sort of grew tired of fighting against the weather in the region where I live... It was always the same. Drive to the location, set everything up, align, find the target, start shooting and then mist or clouds roll in so drive back home... and this happened everytime in the last sessions.

However, this weekend I decided to check if I still remembered how to do this. This time I just did a rough alignment of the mount (NEQ-5) and shot with my Nikon D3100 DSLR without the ETX-70, just with my Sigma 18-50 f2.8 which is way more forgiving with the star trails than the 300mm. This means that this image is not from a specific object but from a wide area of the sky which spans 26.5 x 17.4 degrees.

I aimed high in the sky to avoid light pollution since I was near cities and villages and I was just trying to keep it simple. Around there, close to the cenit, was the summer constellation of Cygnus, right in the path of the Milky Way.  This region is packed with objects and stars although this time astrometry is not tagging my nebulas for some reason but, some of the objects you can see are:  North America nebula (NGC 7000) south to the brightest start Deneb, close to it it is the Pelican nebula (IC 5067). Close to the second brightest star, Sadr, are the Butterfly nebula (IC1318) and the Crescent Nebula, next to the right margin, near Gienah, is the Veil nebula, which I already pictured with the ETX-70 here and here.

Enjoy!

The annotated image for reference:

Replying to +Diego Blanco in the comment section, since I can not upload images in the comments, here's a single light frame processed to represent what I was able to see with the naked eye:

Eastern Veil Nebula

This image is part of the veil nebula complex in the constellation of Cygnus. A few weeks ago I took a try to the Western Veil (Witch's broom nebula). Today I bring the other main part of the nebula located south of the previous one and enclosing the spherical residual of a supernova that exploded between 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. The Eastern Veil (also known as Caldwell 33)  brightest area is NGC 6992, trailing off farther east into NGC 6995 and IC 1340.

The image is composed by 45x150' lights, 40 darks, 40 bias, 40 flats and 40 dark flats tracking but not guiding with the ETX-70 (refractor 70mm) mounted on the HEQ-5 with an unmoded Nikon d3100. The processing (quite agressive) was performed  with StarTools and Photoshop. I don't fully understand yet the color module of StarTools  so I raised a little the color saturation on PS.

This was a tough one. I would say that the toughest I've doneutil the date. Not for taking the pictures themselves, that being such a faint object on visible light was tricky enough, but for the processing. The images were taking under severe light pollution and the tracking and phocus was not so good. This joined with the ETX-70 and its halo and coma made it quite difficult to process. Anyway, I'm quite happy with the result.

Enjoy!

And the annotated image: