NGC 6888 - THE CRESCENT NEBULA

This is an image of The Crescent Nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. This was quite a tough nebula to image as it is quite large and has a fairly low surface brightness (mag 10). Initially it wouldn't fit in the FOV of my SC3 and MN56 but fortunately about 6 months ago I had bought a cheap ATIK 0.5X focal reducer. My MN56 effectively became a 381mm F/L at F3. The attached image is approx 200 X 15 sec subs (50 mins total) unguided exposures with IR blocking and Baader Sky and Moonglow filter. Processing was quite hard and done in Registak, Iris and Photoshop. I had to do quite an aggressive stretch in Iris which has made the bright stars bloat a little. Image was captured on 15th July 2006 @ 23:09