Finally dusted off the telescope and camera to take advantage of the clear skies, and reasonably early darkness. Although I expected all the usual problems (broken leads, missing software drivers, spiders in the telescope etc etc) to my surprise everything seemed to work first time !
Here's 2.5 hours of Hydrogen Alpha exposure, 15x10min of the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888) in the constellation of Cygnus. Sometimes known as the Brain nebula", it lies 500 lightyears distant, at an integrated magnitude of 7.
At the heart of the Crescent nebula is a Wolf-Rayet star WR 136/ HIP 99546 (also V 1770 Cyg as its a variable star too) - post red giant phase, with extreme stellar winds lashing out. The shockwave between the slowly moving red giant phase material (thrown out sometime ago) and the fast stellar wind excites Hydrogen and Oxygen gas in the bubble shape of the nebula.
The total integration time of 2.5 hours has revealed some of the much larger, but more
diffuse nebulosity in which NGC 6888 is embedded.
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