The Veil Nebula NGC6960

Friday, August 01, 2008

I located the object that had been my main reason for setting up tonight - the Veil Nebula in Cygnus. This is both a very easy and a very hard object to see. Easy because it's large and one part of it intersects a fairly bright star (52 Cygni - I don't know the exact visual magnitude but it's probably between 4.0 and 5.0), hard because it's quite faint and really requires either a UHC of an OIII filter to see. The last time I'd been out I found the Western Veil (the part that intersects 52 Cygni) and, even with the filter, found it to be quite hard to see. I had my 19mm Panoptic along with the UHC filter and centered my 12.5" scope on 52 Cygni and there it was, a faint, misty streamer of light pouring away from the star. There's a smaller portion of the nebula on the other side of the star but I've so far been unable to resolve this. I spent a good 45 minutes observing this ribbon of light. Now I decided to have a go at the Eastern Veil. This turned out to be almost trivially easy to locate by simply slewing the 'scope to the left slightly. The Eastern Veil resembles nothing more than a cobweb, floating against the stars, with many more filaments and strands becoming visible as I let my eyes relax. This is a truly lovely object to view and one I'm not going to get tired of in a hurry. If nothing else it's made me want to invest in an OIII filter as well as my UHC, as I've heard that an OIII is a better filter for viewing the Veil Nebula.