Cresent Nebula with the Mini

This is the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888 / Caldwell 27) — a shell of gas blown off by a Wolf-Rayet star, one of the most violent objects in our galaxy. The star is shedding its outer layers at millions of miles per hour, and that fast wind is slamming into material it threw off earlier, lighting the whole thing up. It sits around 5,000 light years away in Cygnus, and in a few hundred thousand years that star will go supernova. This is my deepest capture yet. Three sessions — 25th May, 13th June, and last night — combined into a single mega-stack of 1,077 subs. Watching the progression is the fun part: session one was a faint smudge, and by the final stack the shell structure and the surrounding Hα field have properly come through. That’s what integration time buys you. All on the DWARF Mini — the little one.

07-31 00:03 · United Kingdom England

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