NGC 6559, IC4685 and IC1274
This deep-sky region has three main catalogued objects NGC 6559, IC4685 and IC1274.
At the heart of this region lies IC4685 a beautiful blue reflection nebula with a dark river of dust and gases running through its centre. Towards the side is IC1274 and IC1275, smaller blue reflection nebulas and at the bottom is NGC6559 a star forming region comprising of emission and reflection nebulae about 5000 light years from Earth. This entire area is encompassed by H-alpha.
This area can be found in the constellation Sagittarius and is a near neighbour to the more famous Lagoon and Trifid Nebula's.
image specifications
- Total integration time - 4 hours and 50 mins
- Each image was 300 seconds long with the gain set to unity (100)
- Dark and flat calibration frames were used in the stacking process.
How the image was taken
I took this photograph using the Skywatcher 150 F5 6inch black diamond series Newtonian reflector telescope. To enable long exposure at this focal length, I mounted the telescope onto a motorised German equatorial mount (GEM), the Saxon NEQ6 Pro. I paired my telescope with the ZWO ASI533 mc pro cooled one shoot colour (OSC) camera. Dedicated astrophotography cameras can capture more wavelengths of light so more detail can be seen compared to using a standard DSLR camera. The camera has a built-in fan for cooling the sensor to reduce noise, I set the target temperature to -5 degrees celsius.
I took individual images of 300 seconds and stacked these into one image using Deep Sky Stacker. The final stack was almost five hours worth of data.
The final image was edited in Pixinsight and Photoshop.