Pulchritudo inveniri potest in rebus ignotis.
The Constellation of Cygnus is replete with deep sky objects and the brighter, iconic objects such as the North America nebula, the Pelican nebula, the Crescent nebula and the Veil nebulae are frequent targets for astrophotographers.
There are however, many lesser known deep sky objects in Cygnus. More than 400 of the Cygnus objects are catalogued in the Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae, which covers far more than just Cygnus. The catalogue was compiled in the 1960s by the late Beverly Turner Lynds, an American astronomer. The well-known objects are contained in the catalogue, but so are a large number of lesser known objects. In Cygnus there are also nebulae which seem to be nameless, but which are easy to find.
In this imaging session we imaged two nebulae, one from the Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae and the other, which appears to be nameless.
The equipment used
AstroDMx Capture was used with an SV605CC OSC colour CMOS camera and an Altair Starwave ASCENT 60ED doublet refractor with 0.8 reducer/flattener and a Pegasus Focuscube v2. An Altair 2” magnetic filter holder version 2 containing an Altair 6nm Ha/OIII dualband filter was placed in the optical train.
The equipment was mounted on a Celestron AVX GOTO mount. An SVBONY SV165 guide-scope fitted with a QHY-5II-M guide camera was mounted on the imaging scope. An INDI server was running on the imaging Linux computer indoors. The guide camera was connected by USB to another Linux computer indoors running PHD2 autoguiding software via the INDI server. Both the imaging scope and the guide scope were fitted with dew heater strips set on the low setting because of the summer nights. The mount and the focuser were controlled by AstroDMx Capture via the INDI server.
AstroDMx Capture slewed the scope to the star Altair and plate-solved to centre it. A Bahtinov mask was used to enable Altair to be brought into sharp focus.
Altair being focused using a Bahtinov mask
Then AstroDMx Capture plate-solved and sent the scope to LBN 182, a region of nebulosity in the vicinity of 27 Cyg, 28 Cyg and 29 Cyg
AstroDMx Capture was used to capture 3 hours 25 minutes worth of 5-minute RAW exposures of LBN 182 with an assisted meridian flip after 1 hour of capturing.
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture saving RAW FITS files. Live stacking was used to improve the preview of this faint object
A negative preview helping to visualise the nebula
The data were Stacked and partly processed in PixInsight, further processed in GraXpert, Gimp, G'MIC and Starnet++
LBN 182
Annotated image
Then AstroDMx Capture plate-solved and slewed the mount/scope to 68 Cyg which is surrounded by un-named nebulosity and is located a little to the east of NGC7000. 1.5 hours worth of 5-minute RAW exposures were captured by AstroDMx Capture through the same Altair 60mm ED refractor with an 0.8 flattener/reducer and an Altair Ha/OIII dualband filter.
Screenshot of AstroDMx Capture saving RAW FITS files. Live stacking was used to improve the preview of this faint object
A negative preview helping to visualise the nebula
A normal preview
The data were Stacked and partly processed in PixInsight, further processed in GraXpert, Gimp, G'MIC and Starnet++
68 Cyg nebulosity
Annotated image
The lesser known nebulae in Cygnus and elsewhere will be an interesting challenge for AstroDMx Capture whilst the onerous task of migrating AstroDMx Capture to QT6 to enable Wayland compatibility along with considerable code refactoring, increasing efficiency that is being done by Nicola.
