| Here is another urban effort taken from my light
polluted urban driveway. The target is NGC6960, part of the Veil Nebula
complex, also known as the Witch's Broom Nebula. To give you an idea of
the light pollution I deal with for my urban images, scroll down
the page to a picture of my gear while I was capturing this image. The
view is a 30 second exposure at f/5.6 with an ISO setting of 400
looking west over my scope. According to Wikipedia - The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant, many portions of which have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. At the time of explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and visible in daytime. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, and 36 times the area, of the full Moon). While previous distance estimates have ranged from 1200 to 5800 light-years, a recent determination of 2400 light-years is based on direct astrometric measurements. (The distance estimates affect also the estimates of size and age.) Click on the image to see a higher resolution version, then click again on the image to return to this page. |
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