Pickering's Triangle

Added 1664114131 by Heavenly Bodies Studio.

The image is of Pickering's Triangle, imaged by myself from my home in the UK. Pickering's Triangle, having official designation NGC 6979, is part of a supernova remnant known as the Cygnus Loop, about 2400 light years distant. The source supernova was a star perhaps 20 times more massive than the Sun which exploded between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. The remnants are expanding in a corrupted sphere at about 1,500,000 Km/h and now cover an area of the sky about 6x the diameter of the moon, as viewed from Earth. This translates to a diameter of about 130 light years. The shock waves from the supernova blast through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material, causing the compressed sheets of gasses to emit light in the visible and infrared spectra.

The nebula is far too faint to be seen with the naked eye, so requires a telescope with specialised camera, equatorial mount to track the rotation of the earth and a separate guiding camera to accurately control the pointing of the telescope during the long exposures required to capture the details of the nebula. Many of these long-exposure images are stacked to increase the signal to noise ratio and reveal the colour and detail. This image is part of a mosaic of the Cygnus Loop created using 113 x 20-minutes exposures for a total of just over 38 hours of exposure.

The imaging equipment used is a Skywatcher Esprit 100ED Pro Telescope, a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro astro-camera, cooled to -20C on a Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount.