Here is Pickering’s Triangle, the middle part of the Veil Nebula aka the Cygnus Loop. Regardless of what you call it, this is part of a supernova remnant in the constellation of Cygnus. The entire loop is about 3 degrees or six moon widths across. This was shot on August 22nd with my 11″ SCT at f/1.9 with an Antlia Triband RGB Ultra file and ASI2600MC Pro camera.
I’ve been working on the “Squid Nebula” (aka OU4) in Cepheus. It is the smaller elongated blue object above and lies in front of the much brighter “Flying Bat Nebula” (aka SH2-129). The flying bat looks a lot more like a bell than a bat to me but the squid looks like a squid. The Flying Bat Nebula is a Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) emission nebula, glowing reddish from energized hydrogen. The Squid Nebula is an Oxygen III (Oiii) emission nebula energized by a triple star system at it’s core.
The Squid is so faint it was only discovered in 2011. I’ve read in several places you need to have at least 20 hours of exposure to do it justice. After 4 hours taken in June, I felt confident I could see something there. After 4 more taken in August, for a total of 8 hours so far, I have enough for it to start taking shape. That is what you see above.
The image above is just a screen snippet of 8 hours of exposure with a Samyang 135mm lens, Optolong L-Extreme F2 filter (which lets through only Ha and Oiii), and ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera. I extracted the blue channel, processing is separately and then combined it back with the other two channels.
This object will be in the evening sky for a few months, which is good as it has been cloudy a lot. This is undoubtedly the dimmest object I’ve attempted taking the crown from the Spaghetti Nebula (https://jamesdixon.us/12-20-2024-the-spaghetti-nebula/) I shot last winter and plan to shoot again this winter.
Thanks to my friend, Bo Edwards, I was in position to shoot the ISS passing in front of the Moon this morning at 5:43 in Perryville. I used a 127mm Maksutov telescope and my Canon T8i and shot video. The transit took only 0.66 seconds to happen but we could see it coming and knew when to start the cameras. It was moving fast and my stills show two parallel streaks in each frame. On the way home, I stopped at Lake Maumelle to watch the sunrise. It was the same very hazy promising to be very hot conditions we seen for a while.
