The veil nebula
When a star is near its end of live, and it has sufficient mass, it can explode in a very bright supernova. During that explosion it will expel nearly all of its stellar material which will form an emission nebula which we then can observe. Due to its nature it will look like cosmic shock waves, which are rather cool looking - at least from a save distance :)
The veil nebula is such a supernova remnant (SNR) and the first one I photographed. Initially I just wanted to test my duo narrowband filter I required recently, but it looked so amazing that I had to gather more and more data on it. That’s why the framing is a bit of, but more of that in the next section.
Planing, Capturing and Processing
Since this was supposed to be a test I didn’t do much of planing framing wise. It fits rather perfectly in my field of view, which is very nice. I wanted it upwards, but messed up the rotation a bit, so it’s slightly tilted to the left. Unfortunately there isn’t much space left, so I can’t rotate and crop it.
I captured this target over the course of seven nights, which is a new record for me. Going through the data I noticed that some frames are bad due to focus issues and I had to throw many away. Since it affected so many frames I had to investigate it: Turns out I had my electronic focuser configured the wrong way and all frames are slightly of focus wise - what a bummer.
But I decided that I have so much data, it would be a shame to let it got to waste. So I stacked all frames and went on with it. Processing the data was a bit of a fight as I wanted to extract more data than there was, which usually results in a very noisy image. So it took me around 5 tries to get it in a state where I was somewhat satisfied with it.
Final image
Next time
There are two main things for me to consider, if I plan to shoot this again. Most and important is the correct focus - but that’s already fixed for my next image. Secondly the frame. I need to rotate my camera a bit more, so it doesn’t look like it’s falling out of the frame.
Overall I think it di come out okay, I’m not overly happy with it. There is quite some more details still hidden which should come out with the almost 20 hours I poured into it. Maybe I give it another chance next year. For now, it’s up to my next target, a revisit of the andromeda galaxy :)