The Crescent

September 17, 2022

NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus, is mostly made up of ionized hydrogen with a filmy envelope of oxygen (not present in this Ha-only data). Its longest side spans about 25 lightyears, or about 235 trillion kilometers (146 trillion miles), which at only 5000 lightyears away, is a pretty good-sized deep sky object. I spent the entire night capturing hydrogen-alpha data, over 60 subs, 53 of which I used in this stack. I will come back on another night to capture the OIII data. Notes: William Optics SpaceCat51 apochromatic refractor, ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro monochrome camera cooled to -10C, 53 x 300-second subframes (about 4.5 hours of data) stacked in DSS, ZWO AM5 EQ mount, ASIAir Plus controller. (I ordered the ASIAir early August—backordered, and it arrived a couple weeks ago. This is only my second time out with the Air, and I can already see this being be my away-from-home controller).

Cropped to focus on NGC 6888 (above), here's the full FoV from the SpaceCat and ASI1600: