I’ve been really lucky lately with some great clear nights, mostly during weekends. I don’t really have time to image during the week and summer nights are already short enough. Last night must have been one of the warmest nights I’ve ever seen here. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

I didn’t really have a plan so I decided to radomly point the scope at the Lion Nebula to see what kind of detail I could get out of the head of the lion. It’s a magnificent region with emission, reflection, star formation and two Wolf-Rayet stars lighting the whole area on fire.

This is what went wrong:

• I had some periodic guiding issues causing my stars to be all over the place
• Trying to fix this made me lose focus a few times
• Might also have lost a bit of collimation by tinkering on the scope all the time
• Insects kept flying into the camera cooler

The result is a bit of a hot mess that I had to overprocess to make something out of it. I will definitely try this object again with proper integration time and hopefully with some better results.

I shot this one back in April when it was still low in the sky. This is less data but in much better conditions. It’s a magnificent object and one of the key pieces of the summer sky if you ask me. Stellar winds from a Wolf-Rayet star, 5000 light years away from us.

This beautiful little emission nebula is 6000 light years removed from us.

One of the fascinating things about this region is the objext Cygnus X-1 that is lurking close by.

Cygnus X-1 is a galactic X-ray source discovered in 1971 and one of the first confirmed black holes. It orbits one of the stars in this picture which I highlighted below. It’s actually possible to image the bow shock caused by this interaction, but this would require some monochrome sensor.

Star HDE 226868 is a blue supergiant feeding Cygnus X-1 with stellar winds.

The year is flying by. It feels like only days ago I was sitting outside in the cold trying to image galaxies. Summer skies are exciting: the milky way is up and we have some amazing stars now to observe like Vega, Antares, Sadr, Deneb and many others. Late in the night Andromeda is now visible too and at the dawn of day Jupiter is appearing.

I imaged the IC1396 region 2 months ago but I decided to give it another go with some different framing and post processing.