NGC6960, also known as the Veil Nebula, or Witch’s Broom Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus.

I picked the Veil Nebula as my target in my latest astrophotography session, and was very pleased with the result. The unprocessed photo shown below is stacked in Siril, using 225 exposures of 10 seconds each, captured by my trusted Seestar S50 telescope.

Stacked, unprocessed photo of NGC6960

I processed the photo to get a clearer view of the Nebula and applied some artistic adjustments.

The tools of trade:

  • Siril
  • GraXpert
  • Starnet

The workflow I used in this is the following:

  1. Raw exposures preprocessing
  2. Green Noise Removal
  3. Spectrophotometric Color Calibration
  4. StarNet star masking, processing, recomposition
  5. Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch transformation
  6. GraXpert denoising and background extraction
  7. Cropped to remove field rotation noise

Heres the result:

Processed photo of NGC6960