Revisiting the Crescent Nebula
I’ve imaged this one before, but for whatever reason I picked up way more detail on it last night. Part of it’s a better camera and better tracking on the telescope mount, but I think conditions may have just been really awesome last night. It’s not normal to have this many good nights for astrophotography in Florida during the summer, but I’ll take it!
You’ll find the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus; it’s formed by the stellar wind of a Wolf-Rayet star within it. Earlier in the star’s life it was a red giant, and that stellar wind is pushing out the gases expelled from that phase.
This is a false color image, with ionized Hydrogen mapped to red, and ionized Oxygen mapped to blue and green. About 5 hours of exposure time.
