Cocoon Nebula and Dual Band Filter

 As the nights get longer, I have been enjoying getting some more time in the evenings with my telescope.   This past week with the waxing gibbous Moon brightly illuminating the sky, I decided to use my new ZWO Dual band filter on the Cocoon Nebula (IC5146).



So what is a filter?  Filters are like sunglasses for your telescope, except these are engineered for very specific wavelengths of light.   Dual band filters are allowing two bands of light through.   They are best for imaging emission nebulas in a light polluted sky location, or when the moon is particularly bright in the night sky.   They work great with one-shot color (OSC) cameras, such as my ZWO 183 MC Camera. 

The ZWO Dual Band filter passes light in the visible spectrum in the wavelengths for Hydrogen Alpha (656.3nm) and OIII (500.7nm) through to your camera.   


I wanted to image something in the night sky that was maybe a little creepy looking, as Halloween is nearly here.   So I picked the Cocoon Nebula in the constellation Cygnus.     Located around 2500 light years away, this nebula is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula.

An emissions nebula is where one more more hot stars are ionizing the gas in the nebula, giving off light.   A reflection nebula is where nearby stars are illuminating the nebula's gas, reflecting light into space.

In addition to this nebula, we can also see dark nebula, known as Barnard 168.   It is the dark lane that surrounds the Cocoon nebula and forms a trail upward in my image.   Dark nebulas are absorption nebulas, areas where interstellar dust obscures or absorbs light in these cold molecular clouds.     I hope to get more images of dark nebulas in the future.






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