Category: Deep Sky

This is my first attempt at the Wolf-Rayet star WR-134 in Cygnus. These are very large, very hot stars that correspondingly large stellar wind. It is not obvious here but the blue-green bow shock of that wind is visible in the upper right. Divide the picture into a rule of thirds, or tic-tac-toe, grid. There are four line intersections in that grid and the arc is visible in the upper right intersection of the lines. All of the other gas is reddish but this is not.

Now, for a more fanciful description, I see a face looking to the right. The face has a mouth and nose and is wearing steampunk style glasses. His left eyeglass frame is that bow shock.  He also has a laser pointer strapped to the other side of his glasses because he’s a steampunk/Borg crossover cosplayer.

This was made from four hours of five-minute subs, with my Samyang 135mm and ZWO ASI294 MC Pro on my AVX mount using an Antlia Quadband light pollution filter.

The aforementioned laser pointer is actually the Tulip Nebula and in the lower right is the Crescent Nebula. There are also two open star clusters near the center but how would you tell?

Shot Thursday night from the River Ridge Observatory. I can see now that I need to try this again with my Hyperstar C11 which has 3x plus the focal length and it would be a good match for that scope.  

It was a good night at the River Ridge Observatory. Cool but not too cold, clear skies, slight breeze. I got a late start after attending a star party earlier. My first images were just after midnight. I stayed until after 5AM. I considered shooting the sunrise on the way home but I was 30 minutes too early for that and I had been up for 26 hours except for three or four short naps.

These were taken between August 3 and 7 during several days of clear weather. You can click on any for larger image.