Chaos overhead – the Butterfly in the sky

This year the sky is not cooperating. While the days are clear, the night sky is full of clouds. I am wondering if the trend will get far worse as we approach winter given the emerging Super El Niño prediction this year. We are finding ourselves getting aggressive – we are game even on full moon nights. In particular, the deep sky features where hydrogen alpha shines, moon is less of an influence.

The hydrogen alpha dominated region surrounding Sadr, the bright star in the image, in constellation Cygnus (swan). The Sadr complex is overhead during midnight in Jun. Bulk of the imaging was done using narrowband filters (~7hr of Ha and 3 hrs of Oiii).

The word Sadr is derived from Arabic, and it means chest or heart. Metaphorically, it is the place inside you where your faith, feelings, and character live. The Sadr region (aka Gamma Cygni Nebula or IC1318) is an emission nebula in constellation Cygnus (Swan) and looks like a butterfly. The prominent star is Sadr (Gamma Cygni).

Cygnus (swan) in visible light spectrum showing the broader context of other deep sky objects like the North America and Veil nebula. The box shows the region our telescope captures. At the heart of the swan is the Sadr star.

The view of the region in hydrogen alpha spectrum. Both these are screen captures from my trusted Sky Guide app.

This is the first pixinsight processing where I have moved away from Graxpert background gradient correction to MultiscaleGradientCorrection. Like everything in PixInsight, the correction is using science based approach, in this case it uses SpectrophotometricFluxCalibration using real data. I have been finding myself getting annoyed with Graxpert lately, the AI method introduces strong artifacts in the image. Now it remains to be seen if I can correct some of my prior images.

Written by locomotoring

July 24, 2026 at 6:41 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with astrophotography, science, space

Locomotoring