October 6, 2013 – The Amazing Sky

A cocoon of glowing gas sits at the tip of a dark cloud of interstellar dust.

It’s been months since I’ve shot more “traditional” astrophotos, meaning images of deep-sky objects through telescopes. But the last couple of nights have been excellent, and well-timed to the dark of the Moon.

This is the Cocoon Nebula in Cygnus, aka IC 5146. It is a cloud of gas about 4,000 light years away where new stars are forming. They are lighting up the gas to glow with incandescent pink colours.

The Cocoon sits at the end of snake-like dark nebula known as Barnard 168 which, in the eyepiece of a telescope, is usually more obvious than the subtle bright nebula. Photos like mine here, with long exposures and boosted contrast and colours, make nebulas look much brighter and more colourful than they can ever appear to the eye.

For the technically curious, I shot this with a 92mm diameter apochromatic refractor, the TMB 92, and a Borg 0.85x flattener/reducer, a combination that gives a fast f-ratio of f/4.8 with a very flat wide field. I also used my now-vintage filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800. This is a stack of five 12-minute exposures, registered and median-combined in Photoshop to smooth out noise. All processing was with Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop CC. The telescope was on an Astro-Physics Mach 1 mount, flawlessly autoguided with an SBIG SG-4 autoguider.