ASTRO: Part of NGC 6992 Up close and personal.

The Cygnus Loop is a huge bubble of gas blown by a super nova some
15,000 years ago about 2600 light-years from us according to the HST
website. APOD says 7500 years ago and 1400 light years distant. Other
sources give other figures but the ratio stays rather constant. In
other words this one is still rather unknown as to distance and time
though the trend is make it smaller and nearer. It was said to be over
100,000 years old when I first learned of it nearly 60 years ago!
Various parts of it go by various common names. Veil, Witches Broom,
Pickering's Triangle and others. It also has several NGC and IC
numbers. You need a system with over a three degree field of view to
see the entire bubble, 6 times the size of the full moon. Like most
bubbles it is the edges that are the easiest to see as the gas there is
thicker from our perspective. The portion in my frame is of the
northeastern edge of the bubble known as NGC 6992. My field is way too
small for even that so I have just part of it. I'd need at least four
such images to cover all of NGC 6992. That was my intent last summer
but weather prevented it from happening. It took several nights just to
get this one part.

Most images of this object are seen in narrow band images to better
separate the elements in the shock front. I didn't begin to have the
clear sky time needed for this so went with my normal LRGB image format.
Still the elemental separation is quite obvious.

As far as I can determine no one has found any remnant of the star that
is causing this.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
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