Stellar Shot of the Week: November 19, 2021
"Pickering's Triangle (NGC 6979)" - by Jason Close

Congratulations to this week's Stellar Shot selection, which goes to Jason Close and his magnificent image of Pickering's Triangle (NGC 6979). This impressively intricate target is part of the larger Veil Nebula complex, and the amount of detail Tom has managed to bring out is nothing short of breathtaking. All of the little ripples and folds in the gas are brought out beautifully in his processing, with practically no noise across the entire frame and a color balance that looks good on every screen we've tried. This image was taken with one of our SVX130T scopes and a dedicated SFFX-1 field flattener, along with the ever-impressive ZWO-ASI533MC-P camera. This image has the tell-tale signs of a bicolor image with that vivid red, white, and blue pallet, and in this case that was thanks to the precise filtration of the Optolong L-eXtreme filter. According to Wikipedia, "The Veil Nebula [of which Pickering's Triangle is a part] is expanding at a velocity of about 1.5 million kilometers per hour. Using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 1997 and 2015, the expansion of the Veil Nebula has been directly observed." So maybe in 20yr Jason can take a follow-up for us and we'll see that too!

Great work by Jason with this absolutely stellar shot, and we hope anyone else with images taken by their Stellarvue scopes will submit some of their work too! We'd love to see what you're all capturing these days! Please submit them any time by email (using mail@stellarvue.com) or by tagging them with #stellarvue and #stellarshot.

Image details:

• SVX130T Refractor w/ 1x SFFX1 field flattener
• ASI533MCP Imaging Camera (0.818”/px image scale)
• L-Extreme Dual-Band Optolong Astronomy Filter
• EQ8-R Pro Mount (PHD2 guiding w/ Innovations Foresight ONAG, ASI294MCP as guidecam)
• Bortle 6.5-ish, Edge of Las Vegas valley
• Processed in PixInsight
• 10hr (10m subs); Over September 15-17, 2021