As most of you know, this image is taken in the constellation of Cygnus at a declination of +40 degrees.  I needed a break from my recent work on tiny galaxies and faint small vdB nebullae.

This is the beautiful and complex region around the bright star Gamma Cygni, also named Sadr. The bright star, magnitude 2.2, is huge compared to our Sun, being 12 times the mass, 150 times the radius, and emitting 33,000 times as much energy. 

In terms of object designations, few objects in our hobby are as confusing as IC 1318.  In fact, even established resources disagree on it. The designation that makes the most sense to me was documented by Steve Gottlieb in the September 2012 edition of Sky and Telescope magazine.  IC 1318 consists of 5 bright regions designated from a through e and running from west to east.  IC 1318a is slightly off frame to the right, and IC 1318b is slightly off frame above right.  In this image, the bright region at upper right is IC 1318c, the bright region at center is IC 1318d, and the bright region at lower left is IC 1318e.

The Butterfly Nebula consists of the large central 20 light year wide horizontal dust lane (the body), flanked by the 2 wings, IC 1318d above and IC1318e below.

The Inchworm Cluster is the brilliant open star cluster NGC 6910 that lies at the top center of the image.

The objects lie at different distances from us.  Bright Gamma Cygni is about 1800 light-years away, while IC 1318 and NGC 6910 range from 2,000 to 5,000 light-years away.

I find the SNR-like reddish faint filaments at the center and lower right of the image to be intriguing.  

This entire area is dominated by hydrogen gas emission, but oxygen and sulfur also are present and contribute to the narrowband color spectrum seen in the image.  The image is a SHO image with RGB stars.

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This object is one of many included in both of my free astrophotography targeting tools:
- Imm Deep Sky Compendium (a detailed Excel spreadsheet prioritizing 3100 targets based on time, your location, and moon location)
- Top 750 DSOs (a simpler pdf tool for quickly seeing what is overhead on each night of the year)