Cygnus

Derby and District Astronomical Society

Cygnus

The Swan

Adrian Brown produced this spectacular image of Cygnus over several nights in August 2007. Many of the hydrogen nebulosities in the constellation are visible including the North America Nebula, Pelican Nebula, Crescent Nebula and the Veil Nebula. The image is comprised of 9 panels, taken with a Pentax 50mm f/2 SLR lens stopped down to f/4, a 6nm Hydrogen-Alpha filter and an ATK16HR CCD camera. The total exposure time as 12 hours. To align the mosaic panels, Adrian used a program called Registar. Maxim DL was used to stitch the panels into a single image and Photoshop was used to further process the image.

For the Perseid meteor shower maximum on the 12th August 2007 Chris Newsome travelled 200 miles to the to the far west of Pembrokeshire and took this 30 second exposure of Cygnus, the Milky Way and a Perseid (right side of frame). The picture was taken using an unmodified Canon EOS300D camera with a 27 mm lens at 800ASA. It was then processed slightly in CS2. Chris comments: "It was fantastic to see the Milky Way in all it's glory. The nearest sodium light was around 10 miles away and shielded by the Preseli Mountains. The Perseids were coming through the atmosphere thick and fast and bright! It got to a point that there were so many stars on view that it was difficult to make out some of the constellations at times!"

Chris Newsome took this image of The North America Nebula and surroundings in Cygnus on the 17th November 2005. He used a Canon EOS300D camera with a 55mm lens and light pollution filter. The camera was piggybacked on a Celestron C6-N with a CG-4 mount. The image comprises eight 5 minute exposures at 1600ASA, which were stacked and dark subtracted in K3CCDTools and then processed in Photoshop v7 (GradientXTerminator, curves and RGB levels). The bright star at the centre of the image is Deneb and the North America Nebula (so named because of its shape) lies above it - on its side with 'Central America' at left! Just below NGC 7000 (in the 11 o'clock position from Deneb) lies the fainter Pelican Nebula (IC 5067-70). In the 7 o'clock position from Deneb in the lower-left portion of the image is the star Sadr (Gamma Cygni). This is surrounded by a complex of emission nebulosity designated IC 1318.

The following picture shows Cygnus (centre) and Delphinus (at left) and was taken by Chris Newsome on the 25th September 2005. Note the faint silhouette of Chris' telescope against the sky background in the lower part of the image.

Chris Newsome took the following picture of Deneb and surroundings (complete with the trail of the Thames Valley Police helicopter!) on the 10th July 2005 from Reading.

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