The Tulip Nebula is a 70 light-year sized glowing cloud of interstellar gas and dust about 8,000 light-years distant. UV light from young stars in the Cygnus OB3 association, including the bright O type star HDE 227018, ionizes atoms to produce the observed Ha, SII and OIII emission, which I rendered here in Red, Green and Blue, respectively. For my rendition I wasn't getting anything that looked great using an SHO palette, I liked the HSO version better, and much easier to get a nice tulip color. I left the resultant green stars as is. For this image I had no luck with removing the stars using Starnet.

Also located in this image area is the famous microquasar Cygnus X-1, one of the strongest X-ray sources our sky. While Cygnus X-1 is not optically visible, the extremely hot blue star HDE 226868 is the binary companion of the Cygnus X-1 black hole. In this image, the blue companion is the brighter of the two bright stars vertically centered to the far right. The stellar black hole that drives Cygnus X-1 is continually eating the star-stuff from this blue star, that star-stuff rotates in toward the black hole's accretion disk, and then is formed into powerful jets of material and radiation, including the X-rays that we can detect here on Earth. In this image, you can see some of the shock front as a jet encounter gas and dust in the region, visible as a blue arc at the upper right.

My Processing
·         DSS Stack
·         SHO composite processed in StarTools
·         Topaz AI DeNoise
·         Photoshop finishing

Imaging data is from the RASC Robotic Telescope:
·         Date taken  2019 July                                                           
·         Exposure     Narrowband      25  hrs                                                         
·         Narrowband  Ha, OIII, SII subs  18,17,15   @1800 sec    1x1
·         Narrowband flat frames 5
·         Bias frames 16                                                                                                                         
·         Sierra Remote Observatories, Aubery, California                                              
·         Telescope   RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length)                                                   
·         Camera       SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096)                                                        
·         Mount         Paramount ME                                                
·         Filters          SBIG Ha (7nm), OIII (8.5nm), SII (8nm)