Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  Filamentary nebula  ·  Lace-work nebula  ·  NGC 6960  ·  The star 52Cyg  ·  Veil nebula
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Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette
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Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette
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Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette

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Description

This is a wide FOV image of the Western Veil Nebula, NGC 6960, in the SHO palette, located in Cygnus just south of Aljanah (Epsilon Cygni). Normally I see this imaged in bi-color showing H-alpha and OIII. But recently I observed from other imagers that there was indeed quite a bit of SII signal in this nebula, and so I decided to acquire all three of my NB channels and process in SHO. Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome, although the stars came out a bit elongated in DEC (up-down). Surprisingly, I was able to acquire this much detail despite the growing amount of smoke settling in my area from the regional fires including the huge one in Northern California. (My recent LRGB imaging has not fared as well, however.)

The nomenclature on labeling this nebula region is not entirely consistent in the literature. The whole structure, some of which lies to the left of my image, is typically referred to as the Veil Nebula (seems to be most common), Cirrus Nebula or Filamentary Nebula, although sometimes those latter names refer to just the brighter remnants.

The three main parts are (from Wikipedia):

• The Western Veil (Caldwell 34) with NGC 6960, sometimes called the Witch’s Broom or Finger of God. This is the brightest filament to the right in the vicinity of the bright star 52 Cygni.

• The Eastern Veil (Caldwell 33) with NGC 6992, NGC 6995 and IC 1340, which are to the left of my frame. It is my hope to image this area later and then form a mosaic with the data shown here.

• Pickering’s Triangle (or Pickering’s Triangular Wisp), which includes the bright area towards the top as well as the filaments along the center of the image. Those came out much better than I was expecting.

This was first observed by Herschel in 1784. This is a cloud of heated and ionized gas, a large and faint supernova remnant. The larger region, much larger than my image, is Sharpless 103. The SN exploded around 3,000 to 6,000 BC, and the remnants are a good 3 deg in diameter, or about 6 times the diameter of the Moon. The distance is approximated as 1,470 ly. The filaments are the edge-on portions of the shock wave from the SN, which are less than one part in 50,000 of the radius.

I was able to annotate one lonely little distant galaxy peeking through the nebula gas (and much closer forest fire smoke): PGC 90374. This is a faint smudge in my image, but upon close inspection (zoom and enhance!) you can see it's a far away galaxy with a nucleus and faint wispy outer regions to the upper left, lower right. (Don't look for any more detail than that here.) I looked it up on NED (J20493965+2936291) for its particulars. It has a redshift of z = 0.015974, size of just 0.56 x 0.22 arcmin. It is known to be a spiral. Its distance is estimated to be around 68 +/- 5 Mpc, which is around 222 Mly from my backyard. I'm starting to get a "feel" for these distances from my images, and my nose sniffed it out to be 200 Mly, which ain't bad at all.

I hope you enjoy, and please be on the lookout soon (hopefully) of my rendition of the Eastern Veil and, if it comes together, a mosaic of the larger region.

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    Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
    Original
  • Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
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  • Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
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  • Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah
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B

Description: Luminance Image

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C

Description: Inverted Luminance Image

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D

Description: Annotated SHO Image

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Western Veil Nebula NGC 6960 SHO Palette, Ben Koltenbah

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