The Crescent Nebula – NGC 6888

About a year ago I finished a project imaging NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. It’s a fantastic target, an emission based nebula from constellation Cygnus that is about 5k light years away from Mother Earth. The bright star in the center is a Wolf-Rayet star, WR136. Truly a fun target to go after.

At the time, I was still new to my Celestron scope, figuring out the particulars with acquisition and post processing. A journey I’m still on a year later. I started imaging this from Lake Henshaw but I believe all of this data is from Tierra Del Sol observation site. Both locations are in the San Diego, CA area.

The image here represents about 5.5 hours worth of data. Each light frame was over 13 minutes long. In retrospect, that’s some good guiding at 2350mm focal length. While I like the image, I need to re-shoot this with my current cooled camera and more current methods on post processing.

Image Details
Mount: Celestron CGX
OTA: Celestron 9.25 EdgeHD (2350mm focal length @ F/10)
Camera (DSLR): Nikon D750
Guiding: Celestron OAG w/ZWO ASI224MC

Lights: 24x820s @ 400iso
Flats: 33
Darks: 26
Bias: 48

Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro
Registration/Integration: Astro Pixel Processor
Post Process: Adobe Photoshop

The Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888

Sometimes I document the experience and this was one of those trips. No narrating, just b-role leading up to the final image above. Packing all your gear up and trekking out to some remote location seems like a lot of work. It may be, but it’s sometimes a required component of exploration and definitely an important part of the overall experience.

A short video, capturing NGC 6888.