Royal City Un-Veil-ing

Tonight I presented on the topic of Astrophotography for Royal City Science at Royal City Brewing. If only I had the foresight to call our organization Royal City Astronomy we could have had some Royal City bragging rights for sure!

In any case, we packed the room and I had to apologize for not quite meeting the task of presenting the topic of Astrophotography in 20 minutes.

Just for this occasion I did some quick processing of a target I captured last summer but neglected to bring to completion- the Veil Nebula. It is a very large target so I used the Widefield Rig, which is a VSD100 telescope with 380mm focal length. When coupled to the ASI6200M it frames the supernova remnant nicely. I captured both broadband data to get correct star colours, and narrowband data to bring out the Hydrogen, Sulphur and Oxygen gas emissions.

Top: Red, Green and Blue Broadband Images. Bottom: Hydrogen, Sulphur and Oxygen Narrowband Images

I captured about 100 minutes with each of the HSO filters and a mere 50 minutes of each of the RGB filters. At f3.8 it doesn't take too long!

Left: Broadband images merged into RGB. Right Narrowband images merged into RGB.

Left: Broadband images merged into RGB. Right Narrowband images merged into RGB.

After merging the broadband and narrow band I got to "Veil on Fire"

This video can take you on a tour towards "The Witches Broom"