Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  52 Cyg  ·  HD198330  ·  HD198626  ·  HD198976  ·  HD199055  ·  HD199763  ·  HD199837  ·  IC 1340  ·  LBN 191  ·  LDN 868  ·  NGC 6960  ·  NGC 6974  ·  NGC 6979  ·  NGC 6992  ·  NGC 6995  ·  Sh2-103  ·  The star 52 Cyg  ·  Veil Nebula
Veil Nebula | Widefield, Kristopher McGinnis
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Veil Nebula | Widefield

Veil Nebula | Widefield, Kristopher McGinnis
Powered byPixInsight

Veil Nebula | Widefield

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This is a two panel mosaic of the Veil Nebula complex with each panel having 8 hours of integration time per channel. Unfortunately, the weather has not been great and after nearly a month of waiting I've decided to not wait any longer to obtain the SII data. This image was processed in a custom HOO palette to roughly simulate SHO colorization. Processing steps are included at the bottom of this description (below the crops). As always, any critique on my acquisition or processing techniques is welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than our sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. At the time of explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and visible in daytime. 

The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 36 times the area of the full Moon. At the estimated distance of 2400 light-years, the nebula has a diameter of 130 light-years. When finely resolved, some parts of the nebula appear to be rope-like filaments. The standard explanation is that the shock waves are so thin, less than one part in 50,000 of the radius (about 4 billion miles), that the shell is visible only when viewed exactly edge-on, giving it the appearance of a filament. Undulations in the surface of the shell lead to multiple filamentary images, which appear to be intertwined.

Wikipedia

Crops from the original widefield:

East Veil
East_Veil.png

Pickering's Triangle

Pickering's_Triangle.png

West Veil
West_Veil.png

Processing Guide
Pre-Processing
Image Calibration
Cosmetic Correction
Subframe Selector
Star Alignment
Local Normalization
Integration

Linear Processing (Ha_Panel1, Ha_Panel2, OIII_Panel1, & OIII_Panel2)
Fast Rotation (90CCW)
Dynamic Crop
Automatic Background Extractor
Star Alignment (Thin Plate Spline, Register/Union - Separate, Frame Adaptation)
Gradient Merge Mosaic (Overlay, Shrink = 1, Feather = 30)

Linear Processing (Ha_Mosaic & OIII_Mosaic)
TGV Denoise
Multiscale Median Transform
Deconvolution
Histogram Transformation (STF Stretch)

Non-Linear Processing (Custom HOO)
Pixel Math (R = Ha_Mosaic, G = Ha_Mosaic*0.4 + OIII_Mosiac*0.6, B = OIII_Mosaic)
LRGB Combination (Extracted Luminance from Custom HOO, Lightness = 0.6, Saturation = 0.4)
StarNet2

Non-Linear Processing (Custom HOO_Starless)
Curves Transformation (Contrast)
Histogram Transformation
HDR Multiscale Transform
Pixel Math (HOO_Starless*0.67 + HOO_Starless_HDR*0.33)
Unsharp Mask
Curves Transformation (Saturation)

Non-Linear Processing (Custom HOO_Stars)
Exponential Transformation (PIP) (Star Mask to Protect Smaller Stars)
Exponential Transformation (PIP) (Star Mask to Protect Smaller Stars)
Curves Transformation (Star Mask to Protect Larger Stars)

Non-Linear Processing (Custom HOO)
Pixel Math (max(HOO_Starless,HOO_Stars)

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Veil Nebula | Widefield, Kristopher McGinnis

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Cloudy Nights
Imaged with N.I.N.A.