This is a mosaic of two images of the Veil Nebula using the SHO Palette. I posted the Western Veil NGC 6960 (Right Side) earlier using a different color balance. I was encouraged to go back to my data and try again to differentiate the Ha and SII signal. In this version one can better see the contributions of all three color wavelengths. SII is certainly the weakest, and areas of its greatest contribution can be seen to mostly mix with the Ha, however areas of stronger relative Ha contribution now show up clearly in green. Meanwhile the OIII remains distinct in blue.

I reported features of the Western Veil side in the earlier post. On the left is prominently the Eastern Veil (NGC 6992). Remarkably, I was able to annotate two distant galaxies on the left side of the image. One is PGC140941, or 2MASX J20581230+3004375, a Seyfert 1 galaxy, redshift z = 0.032941. This should correspond to a distance of about 460 Mly according to an online calculator. The other is PGC3096599 or LEDA 3096599, but I couldn't find much about it.

In the last uploaded version (Version F) I have included a superposition of the full moon to scale in order to demonstrate just how expansive this nebula is in the night's sky. The moon is about 0.5 deg in diameter on average, whereas the Veil Nebula is about 3 deg in diameter.

The moon image was taken from Wikimedia Commons, created from data taken by the Galileo spacecraft on Dec 7, 1992 on its way to explore Jupiter. Three colors were used with the following filters: Violet, 756nm and 968nm.

There are several things about this image with which I am unsatisfied. I have determined that there a pronounced astigmatism mainly along one axis of each picture, more so towards the edges of the FOV. I am hunting down the source of this problem.

The bigger issue was the increasing amount of smoke in the air, particularly when imaging the Eastern Veil on the left side. This caused the SNR to be quite a bit lower on that side of the mosaic. I fitted the frames together by matching their backgrounds, however it was still a challenge to remove or otherwise hide the larger amount of background noise on the left.

Still, I'm pleased that it came together as well as it did despite the extra challenges, and I've been wanting to try out mosaic processing as well as seeing the scale of this nebula next to the size of the moon.

I hope you enjoy the rendition as well as the perhaps less common choices for SHO coloring.