NGC6960 ‘Western Veil Nebula’

I took this photo of NGC 6960, the Western Veil Nebula, from my backyard in the heavily light polluted San Francisco Bay Area on the 29th of July 2016.

The Western Veil Nebula makes up a portion of the Cygnus Loop and is the visible remnants of a Supernova that occurred around ten thousand years ago. The supernova remnant lies about 1400 light years away and this Western Veil, sometimes known as the Witches Broom nebula, spans about 35 light years across.

This nebula is quite faint, so I captured data longer than I normally would. Armed with a suitable amount of coffee, this image is made up of about 3.5 hours worth of captured data. A little over 2.5 hours of that was image acquisition and another hour of calibration data.

The sub exposure breakdown for the light data is:

• 16 x 2 minutes
• 12 x 5 minutes
• 6 x 10 minutes