Sadr and Butterfly Nebula
Sadr and The Butterfly Nebula
This images features a close up of a recent photo of mine (The Cygnus Chest) of the same region but with a narrower field of view. The star Sadr (also known as Gamma Cygni), the brightest in the image, is a 2.23 magnitude star, one of the brightest in the night sky and it is located in the intersection of the asterism known as the Northern Cross in constellation Cygnus. It has 12 times the Sun's mass and about 150 times its radius.
It is visually surrounded by a diffuse nebula called the Gamma Cygni Nebula, IC 1318, also known as Butterfly Nebula. Looking closer to this area, intricate patterns of bright gas and dark dust can be seen, carved by the interactions between the interstellar wind, radiation and magnetic fields. It should be noted that Sadr is not embedded in this nebula but instead is in the foreground in comparison to it. In reality, Sadr is located at about 1,800 light years, while the nebula is at about 5,000.
In the bottom left quadrant, "inside" the blue area, a small cluster, NGC 6910, can also be seen. Discovered by William Herschel in 1786, it can be seen through binoculars but without resolving the individual stars.
The field of view of this image is about 2º x 1.3º, which is equivalent to 6 x 4 Full Moon size.
The image is built as an HOO with RGB stars and it was captured at Barcarena, Portugal (Bortle 8) in July 2023. As usual, struggled a lot with Oiii data, as it showed some gradients complicated to remove - still today I am unsure if it is properly modeled. On the other side, it was my first attempt to obtain a "natural" HOO, as usually I employ orange/golden tones for the hydrogen - I am fairly happy but still not sure if it is the right tone, or at least the one I have in my mind. Truth to be told, I really enjoy RGB tones but from my light polluted sky obtaining good quality data for it is close to impossible.
Technical details:
Ha: 100 x 180'' - July 8 and 17, 2023
Oii: 142 x 180'' - July 15 and 17, 2023
RGB: 362 x 60'' - July 18, 2023
Total Integration: 18h36
SW EQ6-R Pro | TS Optics Triplet APO 800/115 | TS Optics TSFLAT2 0.79x | QHYCCD 268M | Optolong LRGB | Astronomik Ha 6nm and Oiii 6 nm | RBFocus Gaius-S | RBFocus Myrrdin 2.3
Acquired with N.I.N.A. and processed with PixInsight
Full resolution can be seen in my Flickr profile here.
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