The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34) (Alan Howell)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: NGC 6960 · The star 52 Cyg · Veil Nebula

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The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

Link: https://www.starpathimages.com/Photography/Astrophotography/

Powered byPixInsight

The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

Link: https://www.starpathimages.com/Photography/Astrophotography/

Western Veil - (aka The Witch's Broom) - Caldwell 34 -

I've tried to formally capture this amazing nebula a couple of times but it has always been tricky from my light polluted skies. After seeing the Hubble images of this nebula, it was one of the deep-space objects that really got me interested in astronomy and astrophotography. I'm proud to finally release this image, taken with a 344mm f/4.8 refractor telescope, a dedicated color astro camera with full RGB filters, and a star tracker to match the Earth's rotation velocity.

Exposure time was 14.5 hours in Bortle 6 skies, with 'above average' transparency, and 'above average' seeing conditions per Astrospheric.
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The Western Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the northern constellation Cygnus, the Swan, and is part of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant, approximately 2400 light-years away from Earth.

The main central star is '52 Cygni' which has an apparent magnitude of 4.22. Based on its Hipparcos parallax, it is about 291 light-years (89 pc) away.
The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. At the time of the explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and visible in the daytime. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, and 36 times the area, of the full Moon).

The Hubble Space Telescope captured several images of the nebula. The analysis of the emissions from the nebula indicates the presence of oxygen, sulfur, and hydrogen. The Cygnus Loop is also a strong emitter of radio waves and x-rays.

It is unknown if the broom belongs to the good witch or the bad witch.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8497025
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

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The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

The Western Veil Nebula - NGC 6960 (Caldwell 34)

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