NGC 6888 — The Crescent Nebula

Target & processing

The Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, appears as a bright, wispy arc in the constellation Cygnus. This is a Wolf-Rayet star surrounded by a vast, interstellar gas cloud. As seen from Earth, it lies near the Summer Triangle asterism in the northern hemisphere. Six thousand seven hundred four light-years away, this object shines with an otherworldly light.

Most of the images I've seen of this target is centered and with a HOO palette. I noticed some SII signal, so I decided to go with a SHO palette and with a different composition, to include it's environment, and especially the part on the left of the image, that I like it very much (I like the mix of colors, with some cyan and magenta).

Also, the most observant would noticed the spikes on the stars. They shouldn't be here with a RedCat 51. Although this could be added during processing, this is not the case here (I try to keep the processing relatively minimal). But when looking at Hubble and JWT images, I noticed these spikes on stars, and found that it was really bringing something to the image, so I decided to 3D print a diffraction spike mask to put in front of my RedCat. I even had to re-acquired the stars, because I already acquired them when I decided to do some tests with a diffraction mask.