NGC 6960, NGC 6992 and Pickering's Triangle

 

The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus.^[4]

It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop,^[5] a supernova remnant, many portions of which have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.^[2] At the time of explosion, the supernova would have appeared brighter than Venus in the sky, and visible in daytime.^[6] The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, and 36 times the area, of the full Moon).^[4] While previous distance estimates have ranged from 1200 to 5800 light-years, a recent determination of 2400 light-years is based on direct astrometric measurements.^[2] (The distance estimates affect also the estimates of size and age.)

·         The Western Veil (also known as Caldwell 34), consisting of NGC 6960 (the "Witch's Broom",^[12] Lacework Nebula,^[8] "Filamentary Nebula"^[12]) near the foreground star 52 Cygni;

·         The Eastern Veil (also known as Caldwell 33), whose brightest area is NGC 6992, trailing off farther south into NGC 6995 (together with NGC 6992 also known as "Network Nebula"^[13]) and IC 1340; and

·         Pickering's Triangle (or Pickering's Triangular Wisp), brightest at the north central edge of the loop, but visible in photographs continuing toward the central area of the loop.

The image data was taken at Okie-Tex 2021 near Kenton, Oklahoma.  The above image has NGC 6960 upper left, NGC6992 lower left, upper right, and Pickering's Triangle, lower center, captured with a one shot color camera a StarLight Xpress SXVR M 25C.  The image is made of 30 ten-minute exposures using AstroArt 7 then calibrated, combined and processed using AstroArt8.  The camera was mounted to a AstroTech AT72ED refractor.  The guiding setup was a ZWO ASI120 attached to a SVBONY SV106 guide scope piggybacked on the AT72ED.  The imaging setup was mounted on an Astro Physics AP900.  Guiding software was PHD2.