The Eastern Veil Nebula

Once again, I’m continuing the journey of exploring old targets with the Hyperstar. This time, I was able to gather about 5 hours of integration on the Eastern Veil. This time around, because of the tighter bandpasses on the Optolong filter, I was really able to capture some of the fainter bits of nebulosity along the front and rear of the bow shock. I once again opted for the Foraxx palette, which really adds some intensity to the color in the image. I ended up tossing out about 40 subframes - 30 of them due to some thin clouds that settled in over the area in the early morning hours, and 10 that had what clearly seemed to be some strange guiding behavior. I’m chalking that up to me forgetting to re-calibrate guiding before I started, and the mount using the last calibration from after the meridian flip on Cygnus wall last night. I also processed the image in the standard palette as well.

Speaking of my Cygnus Wall image, I think I’ve solved the mystery of the strange objects from the Cygnus wall image, as they appeared again in this one (bottom right by my signature)… they are definitely filter halo artifacts. Now the real mystery becomes, why are they only appearing around certain stars and not others? It’s clearly not correlated with magnitude, since the brighter, larger stars should also have halos as well. Once again, using Franklin Marek’s What’s In My Image tool, I found that the stars with halos in this image are of the same type as in the Cygnus Wall image… they are also Long Period Variable stars! I’d be curious to see an explanation of why Long Period Variable Stars are producing these odd haloing artifacts with this filter. I don’t know enough about them or F/2 filters to even make a guess. Hopefully someone who knows better can enlighten me!