Veil Nebula

 This is a 50 minute exposure of the Veil Nebula. This Nebula is 1470 light years away, and it's from a supernova that occurred roughly 8000 years ago. ​Humans alive back then would have been able to clearly see a very bright star during the night. The size of this nebula is 100 light years in diameter, and since it's quite close to earth, it's very large in the sky (roughly 3/4 full moons). This very unique nebula is also very dim at a magnitude of about +18.5 at its brightest. One of the only ways to clearly see it is with a OIII filter on a telescope. The lack of brightness in this nebula makes photographing it without filters very hard, since it also lies in a star rich area. 
Picture
Final Image after Crop
Picture
Veil Nebula Labelled
Details of How the shot was Taken
​
Gear:
  • Olympus OMD EM-5 Micro 4/3 camera 
  • Skywatcher Star Adventurer (Unguided)
  • Olympus 40-150mm F2.8 lens
  • Home made dew heater
    • Made with nichrome wire wrapped in duct tape, which is powdered by a lipo battery 
​Acquisition & Environment:
  • 60x1 minute exposures (1 hours)
  • 1600 iso @ 150mm (300 equivalent) F2.8
  • 50 Flat Frames
  • 23 Dark Frames
  • 55 Bias Frames
  • Taken: August 11, 2018
Processing:
  • Images processed in DeepSkyStacker
    • 2x Drizzle Stack
    • Brought Saturation to 17 and match all rgb levels
  • Photoshop Adjustments:
    • Cropped to remove stacking errors and center the nebula
    • Adjust Levels to bring Histogram to the front and bring out more nebulosity
    • Used RC-Astro's Gradient xterminator to remove the gradient the flats couldn't fix
    • Adjust Colour balance to adjust background colour to be neutral
    • Used Deep Sky Colours HLVG tool to remove any unnecessary greens in the photo
    • Used Astronomy tools to bring out local contrast and make stars smaller
    • Increased the Saturation 
    • Increased sharpness from inaccurate focusing 
    • Exported into jpeg
Picture
The Raw Image From the Camera