Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  27 Cyg  ·  28 Cyg  ·  NGC 6871  ·  NGC 6883  ·  The star 25 Cyg  ·  The star b1 Cyg  ·  The star b2 Cyg
Hills of Cygnus, Dan
Hills of Cygnus
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Hills of Cygnus

Hills of Cygnus, Dan
Hills of Cygnus
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Hills of Cygnus

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Description

This is one of the regions of Cygnus I find particularly beautiful.  In the SDSS data it has a 3D look like hills or mountains, but it's not quite as discernible in broadband.  I am still glad I captured it in broadband because the stars are really spectacular in their natural colors. 

This image is my first successful capture with my Takahashi Epsilon 130D.  It's been a rough ride getting my whole setup to work around this scope.  First it was learning how to collimate the scope (as my first Newtonian I was totally clueless how to operate it), then getting a camera to work with it (I sold my mono camera because I realized I needed much bigger filters, and didn't want to spend an arm and a leg).  Now that it's finally working, I love the scope.  I've struggled with bad star shapes and tilt for years and it's good to finally have a nice, flat field with round stars. 

The broadband data was captured from Bortle 3 skies in the Catskill Mountains at Rockland Astronomy Club's Star Haven.  The nebulosity didn't shine to my liking from this data alone, so I captured an additional night of data from Bortle 8 skies in Central Jersey using a Hutech IDAS NBZ filter.  When I combined the two images the h-alpha really popped, and WR-134 could easily be distinguished.  There was a gradient in the corners that was very difficult to correct.  I ended up cheating a bit by just opening up the image in GIMP and adjusting the color balance in the affected corner.  I ended up cropping the image because the gradient was so bad on the bottom, which unfortunately meant clipping out the Tulip Nebula.  However, I think the framing is better overall without the Tulip visible.

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Hills of Cygnus, Dan