Into the night!  If you’ve been paying particularly close attention, you might have noticed that I’ve not posted any Milky Way or nightscape type images since my trip to California earlier in the year.  This summer has been an absolute bust for Milky Way imaging here in the east, and so I’ve honestly been slow-playing the release of any night images in hopes I’d get more! Well, thankfully this last lunar cycle was full of great opportunities, so I’ve finally got enough stuff to share.  This week, I want to start off by introducing you to a different part of the Milky Way, which is the Cygnus constellation area.  Cygnus, known as the Swan constellation, is located on up the band of the Milky Way from the core (from our vantage point here in the northern hemisphere anyway), closer to the north star.  It is particularly hard to photograph because it’s made up of mostly hydrogen alpha emission (the red you see), which stock cameras have a hard time seeing.

For this week’s image, I captured Cygnus as it was rising behind the walnut tree just at the road in Cades Cove near the John Oliver cabin.  In early June, when this image was captured, the fireflies were in full swing, and they put on quite the display for me in the foreground.  If you notice, they even light up the entire tree like a Christmas tree!  Pretty amazing to see.

For this series of images, what I’ve tried to do is also capture a companion image, which shows a deeper view of the objects in the sky featured in the nightscape.  If you scroll down in the Alternative Perspectives section, you’ll see two more images actually.  The first image you’ll see is the Cygnus constellation, but shot at 100mm, instead of the 35mm of the image above.  Further down you’ll find a Picture of the Week first!  This week I’m also featuring a collaborative effort between myself and my good friend Allen Chance.  Allen has been doing deep space imaging for a number of years, and he was kind enough to let me play with some of the images he’d captured.  The object you see here is known as the Eastern Veil nebula.  As I mentioned, it was captured by Allen, but it was edited by me.  You can see the entire Veil nebula complex in the image above, it sits just to the left of the tree and above the mountains (obviously).  In the image above the nebula is oriented differently than what you see below, but you should be able to make it out.  The image below was captured using Allen’s specialized deep space camera, along with a 925mm effective focal length telescope.  Quite the setup!  It was a blast to play with, and I hope both of the images below give you an even better perspective of what all is sitting in outer space, just outside our normal view.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson