W63 or
G 82.2+5.3 is a very large and extremely faint supernova remnant that is rarely imaged. My first encounter with this object was Nico Carver’s excellent 8-panel
Cygnus Mosaic. The first professional multi-band images of this object can be found in this
2004 publication. That’s quite recent, so you can imagine it is not well known in the amateur community. You also need a setup with a very large field of view to capture the entire shell. I’m already using the most expensive, high-contrast 3nm OIII filters but this object really benefits from dark skies to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in OIII.
The OIII signal is barely visible in a simple SII-OIII combination. Tone mapping was used on the OIII layer to enhance the visibility of the supernova remnant, with careful noise reduction to preserve most of the delicate filamentary structures in the blue shell. The final revision shows W63 in SII-OIII colors, with Ha mixed in luminance to push image contrast.
Data comes from my wide-field project, and was processed separately to highlight W63.
The full field with 32 hours of total exposure time is posted here:
Tendrils of Northern Cygnus 
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