Attempting to Image the Veil from Brooklyn

Brooklyn, NY is a Bortle class 8 sky. On a good night. Really, that’s it. On a good, clear, low-humidity night, I can see all four stars in the trapezoid shape of Lyra and probably make out epsilon Lyrae as well. Toss in a little humidity or generally poor air quality and I lose all but two of them. That’s pretty much the definition of Bortle 8 skies, actually getting close to Bortle 9. Actually, I would argue that it is really Bortle 9 since I’m only able to get magnitude 4.2 on a good night and I’ve never seen M44 or M31 naked eye under even the best of conditions from here in the past 18 years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. For that matter, I’ve never seen the constellation Cancer from here; there’s just this blank spot between Gemini and Leo and I know where in there to point my binoculars to find M44.

In spite of all that, I decided to do some tests of new equipment by pointing at the IC 1396, the Gamma Cygni region, and then the Veil Nebula. The first two involved using my modified Canon T6i with a Hutech H-alpha filter. I was not surprised to find that I was able to get decent images with this setup; essentially monochrome using only the red channel, of course.

Then while testing out some new software, I decided to point at the Veil nebula with no filter at all. Exposures were limited to 15 seconds using a William Optics RedCat 51 f/5 apochromat, but even the raw images (after adjusting the black and white points) showed hints of the Veil. So I took a lot of frames. And I took darks, flats, dark-flats, and bias frames. Then I fed this all into PixInsight’s weighted batch processing script and discovered the Veil was quite noticeable. PixInsight also has a very nice background modeling script which I used to remove the residual gradient (which was quite noticeable). I’ll try to squeeze in some time to put together some of the intermediate images to show the process.