Peeking into the Cosmic Crib: The Cocoon Nebula! 🐛✨

IC 5146

Happy to share my latest astrophoto – a beautiful capture of the Cocoon Nebula, also known as IC 5146! This celestial wonder is located in the constellation Cygnus and truly lives up to its name, looking like a cozy cosmic cradle.

The Cocoon Nebula is a fascinating mix of emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity, all wrapped into one! At its heart lies a young, hot star that's just recently formed. This star is doing a couple of things:

It's ionizing the surrounding hydrogen gas, causing it to glow red (the emission part).

It's also illuminating nearby dust clouds, causing them to scatter its light and appear blue (the reflection part).

And then, wrapping around these glowing regions, you have dense, dark dust lanes that block out the light from background stars, giving the nebula its distinctive cocoon-like shape.

This combination of different nebula types makes it a really dynamic and visually rich object to photograph. The dark lanes are particularly interesting as they are dense clouds of molecular gas and dust, often where new stars are beginning to form.

In terms of scale, the Cocoon Nebula is quite large, stretching about 15 light-years across. Imagine that distance! It's also quite a trek to get there from Earth, sitting approximately 4,000 light-years away. Despite its distance, its intricate structure and vibrant colors shine through, revealing a busy star-forming region in our galaxy.

I think I got the duration of the exposure wrong to get a nice SNR but I guess you learn from your mistakes!

Integration time - 3h41
32 x 180s - 96 mn 25 x 300s - 125 mn

Setup:
TS-Optics SD-APO 102mm f/7
ZWO ASI533MC Pro
Sky-watcher EQ6-R Pro
Optolong L-Ultimate
Askar M54 OAG
ZWO ASIAIR Pro
ZWO EAF
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