So, I and Bostronomy are at it again with another collaboration, this time with a much harder target and a much wider field of view. The Cygnus Loop, aka Sharpless 193, is a large supermova remnant in the constellation Cygnus. It consists of deep space objects NGC 6960, NGC 6979, NGC 6974, NGC 6992, NGC 6995, and IC 1340. Common names for these areas are the Eastern and Western Veil Nebulae. This target is challenging for many reasons, but the shear amount of stars in this location as well as the deep sky gradient make it a very challenging are to not only image but to process as well.

We took our images in July, July and August and I went through many attempts to stack and process these images to get it to where we both were happy with the final result. The struggle with this was real – from having heavy distortion with the initial stacking to having terrible color gradients, though a lot of trial and error we finally ended up with this. A total of around 17 hours of data produces a pretty sweet image!

Equipment & Stats –

122 x 300s
800 ISO
Radian Raptor 61
Canon EOS Ra
Optolong L-eNhanced filter

76 x 300s
RedCat 51
ZWO asi2600mc
Optolong L-eNhanced filter

Calibrated and stacked in Astro Pixel Processor, processed in Siril and Photoshop.