The transition from summer to autumn in the northern hemisphere creates a convenient opportunity for observation of the Milky Way. It shines high in the night sky, and also there are statistically a significant number of clear nights in this season. Visual observations will require some dark locations far from city lights, but astrophotography, especially with narrowband filters, is more forgiving, and some amount of light pollution is allowed (though not advised at all 🙂 )
I like this part of the year very much. Days are still warm, nights are getting longer, and there are plenty of interesting targets in the sky to choose from. The first usual suspect is the constellation of Cygnus, and I did not resist at all and pointed the telescope there near the end of August. The target was also well known, although not at the top of the popularity lists. Dark nebula Barnard 147 is probably known only to someone who is at least a bit interested in astronomy.
Barnard 147 lies in the middle of the frame above and is surrounded by interstellar clouds of dust and gases. The red hue around comes from the hydrogen that is present almost everywhere, but in some places, there is much more of it. Once some hot star is nearby, that hydrogen cloud starts to shine red. If there is a cloud of dust near the star, then we have a reflection nebula that glows more or less in the nearby star color. If the cloud of dust is not lit by any star, then we have a dark nebula, that obscures the universe behind it.
NGC6914 is the quite well-known reflection nebula in a different region of Cygnus. You can see this in the center of the frame below. This nebula stands out clearly from the hydrogen background. NGC6914 may be formed with the same dust cloud as the dark nebula that spreads vertically across the middle of the photo. Just some regions are illuminated by the nearby bright stars and here we have the reflection nebula.
When you enlarge the image you can see a smaller and more yellow irregular reflection nebula below the last blueish cloud. It is Parsamian 22 located among the Dolidze 8 star open cluster.
The last image brings us to the Cepheus constellation and a very well-known stellar masterpiece – Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. The amount of captured data was not very large, so the faint areas reveal some noise, but I think the overall effect is quite well. Since the data comes both from hydrogen alpha narrowband filter and also from RGB color filters, some nice contrasty details were resolved at the end of the trunk – the place where new stars are born from collapsing interstellar matter.
Other dark and bright clouds in the image below do not have their own common names. They only exist in astronomy catalogs like Lynd’s Dark Nebulae, Lynd’s Bright Nebulae, Barnard, Sharpless, van den Bergh, or Dobashi. All these items are traveling across space at many kilometers per seconds speed, but yet they are so distant that do not seem to move even for decades.
Image technical data: Date: August/September 2024 Location: Nieborowice, Poland Telescope: TS Photoline 130/910 Corrector: TS FF/FR 0.8x Camera: QHY268M Mount: EQ6 Guiding: ASI290MM + Evoguide ED50 Exposures: - Elephant's Trunk LRGBHa 300:50:40:40:90 minutes - NGC6914 LRGBHa 180:80:80:80:180 minutes - Barnard 147 LRGBHa 330:80:60:60:150 minutes Conditions: Bortle 6, transparency and seeing good
