This is a very wide field image that spans an angular diameter of over 6 degrees. This is the same angle you would see by placing eleven full Moons side by side.
These cosmic molecular clouds lie at the center of our Milky Way in the constellation Cygnus (The Swan) at a distance of 2,000 light-years. Cygnus was one of the original constellations recorded by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy (AD 90 – AD 168). Towards the center of the image lies the bright bluish star “Sadr”. The word Sadr comes from the Arabic word meaning “chest”. Very appropriate since it sits on the breast of the Swan. At the very top left of the image is the “Crescent” nebula.
Many people think you can only take deep sky images from a high mountain located in a remote and very dark location. This was a test shot taken from my drive way earlier this summer during the course of one evening. Passing cars with their head lights beaming to see what I was doing along with the street light two houses down didn’t really make for what I would call a very dark or remote site. J Had this been 40 years earlier when film was the main means of doing astrophotography this image wouldn’t have turned out nearly as well. Had I tried to use film this image would have looked like a thick fog with a few scattered bright stars in the image. Little or no detail would have been visible. Thanks to modern electronics one can now penetrate the less than perfect sky and bring out details that astronomers of the 1960’s could have only dreamed about.
Mach1/STL11K/FSQ-85 L(Ha)RGB 5x1800s Ha, 5x700s RGB