I was not planning to write much of a description for this picture but it ended up containing so much interesting detail that I changed my mind. I'd like to highlight a few objects, in particular: an emission nebula, a black hole, a Wolf-Rayet star, and two (possibly) unnamed objects.

The Tulip Nebula, the featured target of this image, fairly jumps out at you from the bottom right. Located about 6000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, it is an emission nebula rich in Ha, OIII, and SII signal. Its appealing shape, reminiscent of a tulip viewed from the side, and relative brightness make it a frequent target for backyard imagers everywhere. Stuart Sharpless added it to his catalog as Sh2-101 in 1959.

A more interesting object near the Tulip is impossible to see directly but there are clues. Cygnus X-1 is a stellar mass black hole that has a massive and bright O-class companion star. The location of this two body system was not annotated by the advanced plate solve but the companion star is easy to find. Look for a vertically oriented pair of stars to the right of the bottom edge of the Tulip. The companion star is the lower one. Further evidence of Cygnus X-1's presence is seen in the form of a faint bow shockwave above the pair of stars. The unimpressive appearance of the shockwave belies the fact that Cygnus X-1 is one of the brightest sources of X-ray emission in the sky. In fact, it was one of the first objects believed to be a black hole when it was discovered in 1971. Renown physicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne made a friendly bet in 1975 about whether the object really was a black hole (with Hawking betting against). Hawking happily conceded in 1990 when observational data confirmed the black hole's existence. 


Region surrounding Cygnus X-1

The next object surprised me, as I certainly had not planned for it to be in the image. The thick, blue arc in the upper left belongs to a bubble nebula produced by WR 134, a special class of star known as Wolf-Rayet. These are very massive and bright stars that shed their outer atmospheres in powerful stellar winds. WR 134 was one of three stars (the others being WR 135 and 137) discovered in 1867 that were found to have unusual spectra with pronounced emission lines rather than the absorption lines of other star classes. The bubble is obviously rich in ionized oxygen, which appears blue in this picture. 


WR 134

Finally, I'd like to mention a pair of objects with distinct shapes. Look left of center and you will see two (almost) linear structures of gas and dust that remind me of two sticks or twigs. If these do not already have a name then I propose "The Twigs," which is consistent with the botanical name of the adjacent object. Wouldn't one expect to find a couple of twigs near a tulip?


The Twigs

As a side note, I recently acquired a 0.8x reducer/flattener for my 80 mm scope, and my intention with this image was to do a quick-and-dirty version of the Tulip Nebula to test it out. I also wanted to try out NINA (which I had already been using for its image analysis features) for an actual imaging session. So this image is first light for both the new reducer and session software. There is still a lot of tilt and backspacing error that I hope to improve with my new Octopi tilt correction device. NINA worked admirably.