LDN 889 in Gamma Cygni Nebula (IC1318)

This nebula is sometimes called the butterfly nebula thanks to its dark dust band in the middle making it look like a butterfly. This is confusing because there is another nebula called the butterfly nebula, NGC 6302 (in the scorpius constellation) which is more commonly referred to as the Butterfly Nebula. Either way, this is a glorious nebula to image.

When I get my guide scope working with the new telescope, I’ll reimage this again with tracking. This capture was unguided relying on the encoder and short focal length to get a good capture. This is a very widefield image, not too far from the Jellyfish Nebula which is also a really cool.

This region of the night sky is called Cygnus since it’s all in and around the cygnus constellation. The whole cygnus region is home to a lot of very interesting DSOs including the cygnus loop.

LDN 889 is around 100 lightyears across and is roughly 4,900 lightyears away from earth. It’s both an emissions nebula and a dark nebula. An emission nebula is a nebula that has hot gas in it, ionizing it to produce light, that’s the blues and oranges you see in the image. A dark nebula is the dark vein of dust and gas that’s too thick for light to penetrate, that’s the dark band in the center of the image. These are tricky to image, since it’s very easy for editing to hide the detail of the gas.