SH2-101 Tulip Nebula and surroundings

[avdhoeven]

The past week it was such beautiful clear weather that I wanted to tackle a larger narrowband project. In 2013, I once started with a TEC140 with images of the Tulip Nebula in the constellation of Cygnus.
Last year I had taken pictures of the tulip nebula with its immediate surroundings with my TMB92 and there was so much to see there that I wanted to continue this.

Six clear nights were predicted and so I decided to make a larger mosaic of this area. To achieve this I had to do some puzzling about how best to divide the area into sub-images to get the best possible picture. This resulted in a center of 3 vertical shots, with last year's shot in the middle, and above and below shots rotated 90 degrees to add 2 more bands at the top and bottom. It took some puzzling to set the precise coordinates in this way, but in the end it went very well. Below you can see the distribution of the different panels.

I ended up shooting a panel every night with the TMB92, QSI583ws and an astrodon 5nm H-alpha filter with 900s exposures. Total 40 hours (137x900s and 8x1800s from 2013). Of course there were some problems during the several nights (guiding that went wrong, tracking camera that twisted, mount that disconnected and so on), but in the end it worked out and I am very happy with the result.

To see the highest resolution (47mp) I recommend to look at my flickr site.

What a nice detail is that the shock wave of the Cygnus X1 black hole can also be seen nicely:

[AstroBee]

Wow, 7 panels, that's a lot of time and dedication. Congrats!

[KathyNS]

What a spectacular image!

[MariusD69]

Awesome! Great work!

[BABOafrica]

I haven't seen an image of the Tulip for a while now. This is so much more than just another capture. Wow, detail as I have never seen before in this nebula.

Excellent.

BABO

[Makuser]

Hello Andre. This Tulip Nebula (Sharpless2-101) image was a result of a lot of dedication and time well spent. The capture looks tremendous on the flickr site and shows a great amount of delicate details. Thanks for sharing this excellent view with us Andre and it is certainly worthy of a TSS APOD Award.

[Jockinireland]

Thats a stunning image. Such detail. Thanks for sharing.

[messier 111]

magnificent work , thx .

[Greenman]

Amazing image and nicely accompanied with explanation. Thanks for posting.

[Gordon]

Congratulations Andre for having your image selected as todays TSS APOD!

app.php/article/8-16-2022-tss-astrophot ... of-the-day

[AstroBee]

Congrats on the TSS APOD. Lots of effort goes into mosaics like this.

[Unitron48]

Well done! Congrats on your APOD recognition.

Dave

[avdhoeven]

What a nice surprise! Thank you all so much.

[BABOafrica]

Congratulations on the TSS APOD award.

BABO

[STEVE333]

A stunning piece of work, well done. Congratulations on the TSS APOD award, well deserved.

Every mosaic is worth of admiration, but, this is the first mosaic I've seen where horizontal and vertical panels were deliberately planned and then captured and combined. Beautiful work with no seams anywhere. Finding and pointing out the black hole shock wave boundary makes it even more special. A monumental project, perfectly executed with a spectacular result. Thanks so much for sharing this masterpiece!

Steve

[TheButcher]

Excellent!!! Great Job and Congrats on the APOD!

[avdhoeven]

This 90 megapixel image is the result of a cooperation with 3 fellow astrophotographers, Sara Wager, Dominique Dierick and Kees Scherer and myself. It all started in 2017 when we worked together on a larger mosaic of part of the Cygnus constellation.

The zoomable result of this cooperation can be seen here: https://zoomhub.net/al3me

I would recommend to strawl through the image to find all the details. For example the Soap Bubble Nebula, the Cygnus X1 shockwave, Crescent and Tulip Nebula are nicely visible.
Last year (2021) I wanted to make a nice image of the Tulip Nebula (SH2-101) and the nearby hydrogen clouds so I made an image stack consisting of 1 panel of this region. This summer (2022) they predicted a longer period of clear skies and I decided to extend the field of view to get more coverage of this very interesting region.

After finishing this image I noticed that I was very nearby the Crescent nebula region and knew I had a lot of data of that region also, so I decided to look onto my image archive to see which data there was more region and that was how I stumbled onto the mosaic data again that we all captured in 2017. It showed that with this data a very nice field of view could be generated with full coverage from the Tulip up to far above the Crescent nebula. Because of the high quality of the data processing was very easy and that is what resulted in an 90 megapixel image of 4,5x6,2 degrees of sky area.

On my webpage you can find a lot more info and details about the image.

Exposures:
Dominique Dierick: 36x300s Crescent (3h)
Sara Wager: 50x1800s Crescent (25h)
Kees Scherer: 38x900s Overall field (9,5h)
André van der Hoeven: 211x900s Detailed regions (52,75h) Totaal: 90,25h

Equipment:
Dominique: Takahashi FSQ106/QHY163M
Sara: Orion Optics ODK10/TMB152/QSI683wsg
Kees: Skywatcher Esprit 100D/QHY16200
André: TMB92/QSI583ws

[jthommes]

Excellent images. Congrats on the APOD.