Ad Astra Observatory

I went off in search of more Ha targets in Cygnus tonight. Among “famous” astrophoto targets, IC1396 is one of those huge targets that defy most attempts to capture them in one frame. Along with The North America Nebula, The Veil Nebula, The Rosette Nebula, The Pleiades, and the Heart and Soul Nebulae, this target is one of the reasons that I bought Pumpkin: each of these objects is well over 1 degree in size, and thus needs Pumpkin’s wide FOV.

Well, I finally found the limit of that gigantic FOV last night. Massive IC 1396 (just off the Cygnus border in Cepheus) spills over the edges of this frame:

I caught most of it, but it’s definitely spilling off the top and bottom of the frame.

This is a full 4 hours of data, 16×20minutes. Wow. I got the mount up and running by about 11pm, and that gave the scope enough time to capture this much data.

Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can try this target again sometime. But this is a pretty nice shot, I think.