The Eastern Veil Nebula
Eastern Veil Nebula in the Hubble Palette captured with a Takahashi FSQ85 - 6 hours of data
Random technical issues plagued many of my astrophotography sessions in 2024. I'd impatiently wait for the night's deep-sky object to rise above the tree line, only for plate-solving algorithms to fail, the guide scope to lose track of stars, the mount to stop tracking, or the auto-focuser to refuse to focus. Each issue was ultimately intractable and required a costly system reboot—forcing me to restart the session and lose valuable imaging time.
To counter this, I began each session with a 'sacrificial target'—a celestial object used to test and troubleshoot the system before moving to the primary target. While effective, this strategy came at a cost thanks to Michigan's unpredictable weather. To make the most of these sessions, I processed the images from my sacrificial targets.
For summer, my sacrificial target was the Eastern Veil Nebula, also known as NGC 6992 and NGC 6995, the remnants of a star that exploded in a supernova 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, about 2,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation1.
With only six hours of usable data for this project, I opted for my expedited PixInsight processing workflow, optimized for time because of the limited signal-to-noise ratio. After stacking and correcting the raw data, I ran it through a ten-minute processing routine. This approach doesn't produce the best results, but it is quick and works reasonably well with limited data.
Eastern Veil Nebula in the HOO palette captured with a Takahashi FSQ85 - 4 hours of data