The Veil Nebula
The Veil Nebula is one of my favorite objects in the sky and it took a few failed attempts to get it right back in 2019. Unlike a lot of the stuff I post here, you can actually _see_ this with your eyes and a scope (especially if you have an Oxygen III filter on your eyepiece).
I'm not sure what the special allure of this thing is; perhaps the ropy, knotted tendrils of flimsy hydrogen gas, slammed together when the shockwave of a long-ago supernova came ripping through this part of our galaxy.
The Complete Veil Nebula Complex. it's really quite large in the sky, about the width of six full Moons. I took this in 2019 with my widefield camera after getting it wrong at least three times since I started in 2017.
A closeup of the 'hook' end of the Veil which also carries the name “The Network Nebula”.
The Veil is about 2600 light-years away which would be considered fairly close in galactic standards; kinda like 'down the block and around the corner'.
Even still, I'm continually flabbergasted and amazed at the level of detail you can achieve once you have your methods down.
I LOVE this hobby!
I was using a 'travel scope' rig I put together for these astro-glamping trips and this trip was the first real attempt at an image and I'm really happy how it came out considering the sky where I was wasn't all that good being filled with summer moisture and Canadian smoke.
I had a filter on the camera that helps it to see the nebulosity and in this picture, the red stuff is hydrogen and the blue stuff is oxygen.
This Western end of the Veil is often referred to as “the witches broom”!
The new Astro-Glamping setup; I was at the Deerlick Astronomy Village west of Augusta.
This is a great, easy-to-manage travel rig. It's all ZWO cameras and focus motor so I can control the whole thing from an iPad in my chair, drinking a beer!