Pickering's Triangle

Pickering's Triangle, also known as NGC6974 is a faint portion of the larger Veil Nebula. It is a supernova remnant from a star that exploded some 8000 years ago (source Wikipedia). This target is faint requiring very transparent skies for best results (something I did not have while capturing this data) and it is embedded in the Milky Way so the area is very star rich which presents a processing challenge in keeping the many small stars from overwhelming the image. The image is stored at higher resolution that displayed here so use your browser's zoom feature to take a look around. Many of the small knots on gas in the background are actually some of the thousands of faint small stars in the field that resolve when the image is viewed at higher zoom levels.

Object Pickering's Triangle centered just above SAO 70540  Object RA 20:49:19 Dec 31:22:24 Date 2 August 2019 Exposure 100 minutes (10 X 600 seconds)  ISO 800 Camera Canon 60Da DSLR Optics SkyWatcher Esprit 120  f/7 APO refractor with  a  focal length of 840 mm Location Marion Bridge, Nova Scotia Processing This image was processed entirely in Images Plus. Calibration, stacking, statistical filter applied to reduce noise before stretching. ArcsinH stretch applied and a starless mask made from the result and then used in two n'th root stretched. Star reduction applied after each stretch as well as a masked saturation boost. Multi-scale sharpening and contrast enhancement applied with the same mask used during the stretches. Slight masked noise reduction applied then the image was binned by 2 for web display. Since the 60Da has on sensor dark suppression no darks or bias frames were used in the calibration. A single dark was used as a hot pixel map in the calibration.