NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula (Phil Hoppes)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: 28 Cyg · 29 Cyg · 34 Cyg) · Crescent Nebula · IC 4996 · NGC 6888 · Permanent nova (P Cyg · The star Revenant of the Swan · The star b2 Cyg · The star b3 Cyg

NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula, Phil Hoppes

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NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

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NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

So imaging NGC6888 has been a bit of a trip for me. First, I had not realized that the Crescent Nebula was smack dab inside the Milky Way. I have the Milky Way suppressed on Stellarium, which is the main planetarium program that I use. After the first night of Luminance and Red subs were loaded on my Mac I did my usual of blinking the subs in PixInsight to see how many mistakes I made. First sub comes up and WOW I can't believe the number of stars. I did blow it a little. Lost all of my subs first night after meridian flip. I did not realize I had enabled the mount to recalibrate my guiding after a meridian flip. For what ever reason that calibration failed and the rest of the evenings subs were garbage. No worries, made up for it on night 2 and 3 and got all that I needed.

The real challenge for me was post processing. While I could just use Star X Terminator from RC Astro and remove all of the stars. For me, while I do enjoy others that do this, I really don't like to do that completely because, well, the stars are really there. That is what exists and part of the beauty I think is knowing that object is inside a huge field of stars. That being said, I actually did use Star X Terminator to split the final image into 2 images of nebula and stars. Then I used NoiseXTerminator to clean up the nebula regions and then used BlurXTerminator on the star field to suppress the stars by about 40% so they are still there but not so dominant. I also used BXT on the nebula background to sharpen up the gas clouds. I put it all back together in Photoshop for the final post processing.

I'm probably going to fiddle with this a bit more but overall I'm happy with this, especially considering I shot this over the full moon being up on the 3 days I was shooting.

Enjoy!

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Status	Advanced failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7975708
PixInsight job	2PN88OLSWL3S5P43111M7C740UCG1PD9
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

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NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

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NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

NGC6888 - The Crescent Nebula

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