Ever wonder exactly what is up there? Like, really what is up there? While we look up into the night sky and see darkness and stars, there's a lot of "stuff" in between, deep within that dark void of apparent nothingness. Take, for example, the star Sadr in Cygnus. Go out and find it tonight - use an astronomy app like Stellarium to do so. It appears to sit by itself in the night sky. Now, take a long exposure of it with an astronomy camera armed with a hydrogen filter attached to a telescope, and space reveals its true self - massive clouds of hydrogen gas in the background behind the star itself. We can't see this - our naked eye doesn't have the type of filter to pull out this phenomenon. But, shoot the night sky with the right equipment, such as a hydrogen filter that pulls hydrogen light our of the darkness, and you see a very different picture indeed.
the image above was captured in my observatory. The bright blue-white star dominating the center of this image is Gamma Cygni (Sadr), embedded in the emission nebula IC 1318, sometimes called the "Butterfly" or "Gamma Cygni Nebula." This lies within the Cygnus constellation. The vast reddish-pink clouds sweeping across the frame are glowing hydrogen gas (H-alpha emission), ionized by intense ultraviolet radiation from Sadr and other hot young stars in the region.
What makes this image interesting are the dark, winding lanes cutting through the glowing nebulosity - these are dense pockets of cold molecular gas and dust that block the light behind them, creating dramatic silhouettes against the brighter clouds. Sadr itself sits somewhat in front of this nebula complex along our line of sight, so while it appears to illuminate the surrounding gas, its exact relationship to IC 1318 is still debated.
Image Details:
- Imaging Scope: William Optics 61mm ZenithStar APO
- Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Color with ZWO DuoBand filter
- Guiding Equipment: Celestron Starsense Autoguider
- Acquisition Software: Sharpcap
- Guiding Software: Celestron
- Light Frames: 25*6 mins @ 100 Gain, Temp -15C
- Dark Frames: 10*6 mins
- Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker
- Processed in PixInsight (incl. Star Removal using Starnet2), Adobe Lightroom and Topaz Denoise
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