Wednesday 29 November 2017

NGC6960 The Western Veil Nebula

NGC6960. The Veil Nebula: Commonly named the Veil nebula, the Cirrus nebula or the Witches Broom nebula. It lies in the constellation of Cygnus the swan shining at a low surface brightness of magnitude 7 at a distance of 1,500 light years. It was discovered back in 1784 by William Herschel.  I took this image under heavy light pollution and a first quarter moon, the sky conditions was very clear however stars was only visable down to magnitude 4.5. I was using my ten inch F4.8 reflector.with an Atlux mount, an Atik 383L mono CCD camera and P.H.D. auto guiding. The exposure time was one hour for each narrowband filter, [ HA . O111 and S11 ] and forty minutes for each R.G.B. filter. I captured five minute sub frames with matching dark frames and combined them with flat field frames to reduce the effect of vignetting in the final image.

RGB

Bi Colour

Narrowband

Narrowband Unsharp Masked