The forecast early this week showed a couple of clear nights so I decided to try some astrophotography with just my camera, a zoom lens and my mount, and without a telescope. The moon was going to be more than half illuminated, but it would get to 10° above the horizon until around midnight or 1 am, meaning it’s brightness would have minimal impact on the sky glow.
Having just finished modifying my camera I decided an emission nebula would be a good target. The Veil Nebula would be rising in the eastern sky in the evening hours, and the overall size (about 3° diameter) would make for a nice, large image. From my backyard over the course of two nights I took 60 separate, 150 second long exposures, for a total imaging time of 2.5 hours. I also took 40+ flat and dark frames and had a good set of bias frames to use in the calibration / stacking process. There was a lot of noise in the stacked image from light pollution, the heat and the camera, but with a bit of image processing I was able to clean it up quite a bit.
The Veil Nebula is the remnants of a supernova that exploded somewhere between 6000 BC and 3000 BC and is 1470 light-years away. It’s located in the constellation Cygnus and the upper portion is known as the Western Veil and the lower portion is known as the Eastern Veil. I lost a bit of the lighter red areas between the upper and lower areas, although with more imaging time or darker skies I could probably pulled it out of the noise during image processing.
