September can bring some very nice calm-weather dark skies and last Sunday night (the 6th) was one of them. It was enough just to sit outside wrapped up in a blanket and admire the view. To get an idea of how dark the sky was I tried counting (by eye) the number of stars in the great square of Pegasus and came up with seven or eight which is not too bad. Whilst I was using my Dwarf 3 to do some imaging I contented myself by roaming round the sky with my 10x50 binoculars. A few things I found interesting. The first was that I had a really good view of the galaxy M33, which is becoming more prominent in our autumn skies now. I was surprised how bright it seemed in binoculars but it was impossible to see with the naked eye, even though I knew exactly where to look. I also had a go at viewing some double stars, something I have found difficult with bins on previous occasions. I had a look at beta Cygni which is at the head of the swan and a nice combination of blue and yellow stars (magnitudes 3.1 and 4.7). These I did manage to separate into their components which was excellent (they are 34 arc seconds apart). Another pair that I could separate was zeta Lyrae (magnitudes 4.3 and 5.9) which are 44 arc seconds apart. Very satisfying!
Back to the imaging. I chose this evening to have a go at the western part of the Veil Nebula. I have already imaged the eastern part. Here is what I obtained after 199x15s (49.75 minutes):-
The first frame was taken at 23:05 BST and the last at 00:19 on the 7th. The duo-band filter was employed and the gain was set to 60. Auto parameters were used in Stellar Studio. I have increased the saturation and brightness of the image in Photoshop and binned it x2 (please click on the image to see a full-size view). There are patches of nebulosity in a lot of the frame to the left of the central bright star. The main bright patch in the centre of the field of view is the remnants of the supernova shock wave that is still traveling to the right in this frame. This part is called the Witch's Broom (or NGC 6960).
Here is a close-up of the nebula in the centre of the frame at the full resolution of the scope:-
The filamentary nature of this nebula can be seen very well in this image. It almost appears rope like. The bright star at the edge is 52 Cygni and is at a much closer distance to us. For a full description of how this nebula formed please have a look at my previous post.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026
