Last night was the first genuinely clear night in the weeks since I refurbished things inside the observatory. After a good shellfish dinner last night, I went out to the dome to point my astrographs at some challenging objects – things that I have not recorded in the past.
The first object was IC5146 – the Cocoon Nebula. It is a cloud of dust and molecular hydrogen in the constellation Cygnus that is a stellar nursery. The image below is a cropped version of the larger image beneath it (itself a crop of 35mm full-frame DSLR). The image is the composite of 11, 6-minute exposures taken through the 130mm astrograph fitted with a quad, narrow-band filter.
The second object was a small, planetary nebula, NGC7354, that it turns out is too small for the 130mm astrograph to show any detail. This image is the composite of 15, 6-minute frames. Here, the nebula appears only as a little white blob in the center of the frame. I may try this object again tonight using the 250mm RC astrograph to see if the larger instrument will show some detail in the nebula.
