NGC 6960 - The Witches Broom Nebula -2019 Version
Date: August 15, 2019
Cosgrove’s Cosmos Catalog ➤#0004
NGC 6960 - The Witches Broom Nebula - as taken in August of 2019 (click to enlarge)
About the Target
NGC 6960 - a small portion of the "Veil Nebula" - also known as the "Finger of God" and "The Witch's broom". This is a super faint fragment of loops of gas more than 3 degrees across that came from a star 20 times more massive than the sun, which blew its lid 8000 years ago. This giant bubble of expanding gas and dust is near the constellation Cygnus.
Location in the Sky
IAU/Sky & Telescope Constellation Chart of Cynus with the location of the NGC 6960 indicated by a yellow arrow.
About the Project
I stacked 30 frames of 90-second exposures but this guy is so faint I should have gone to 3-minute exposures and built up a couple of hours of them.
Commentary from 8-2-21 when adding this project to the website
Well - this image was taken super early in my Journey and it shows. Too little exposure - poor processing. Pretty bad really. But I want you to think about this a bit differently. All I ever saw visually - even on very large scopes - was a faint wisp of glow. Admittedly - this is a bad image, but even this image shows more detail than I ever saw visually. When you first see the image - it’s magic. I was super excited by this early crude result. And it really was just one of the first steps down the road!
More Info
Wikipedia: The Cygnus Loop
Capture Details
Lights
30 x 90 seconds
The total integration time is 0.75 hours
Cal Frames
not recorded
Capture Hardware
Scope: William Optics 132mm FLT F/7 APO
Guide Scope: Apterna 60mm
Camera: ZWO ASI294MC-Pro
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini
Mount: Ioptron CEM60
Software
Capture Software: Control: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller
Image Processing: Deepsky Stacker, Photoshop, Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second-guessing, and much swearing…..
After much research, and a few phone calls to the helpful friendly folks at Highpoint Scientific , my first rig was on order! Within a week I had everything I needed to start doing astrophotography. But of course, I had no real clue how to actually do ANY of it. I barely knew how to put the pieces together much less make them work. This was the start of my journey.