NGC 6888, Crescent Nebula in Cygnus

May 18, 2023

Another night out with the Optolong l-eXtreme dual narrowband filter, and again, I'm really surprised at the color and detail captured with the two 7nm band passes, one around 504nm for OIII and the second at 656nm for hydrogen-alpha. Star colors look pretty good, and overall this is closer to true color (red and blue generally where they're supposed to be) than hubble palette SHO images. I captured 55 subs at 300 seconds (5 minutes) each, but threw out all but 28 for processing--it was really windy last night and that just throws chaos into tracking and guiding. I have been doing narrowband imaging with monochrome cameras and separate filters for each bandpass for almost a decade, and that's still my preferred method for capturing deep sky objects like the Crescent, but it's also really promising what you can capture with a cooled color camera in one imaging session.

Cropped to NGC 6888: