The Crescent and the Soap Bubble

Description and Details: The Crescent nebula or NGC 6888 , (or Caldwell 27) is an iconic and often imaged astrophotography subject, I've imaged it before at least 4 times, and this one was imaged by my new CDK14 with x0.6 reducer which gives a focal length of approx. 1500mm

Why does it look like that ? At the center lies a rare and gigantic type of star, WR136 , a Wolf-Rayet star so energetic that it has already been a red super giant and blown out a shell of stellar material around 250,000 years ago. You can see the star just above the little dust clump in the middle.

A lot of stuff has been said about this subject, so here's some less common observations on NGC 6888.
The two "shells" surrounding the star WR136 can clearly be seen; they are caused by a fierce stellar wind pushing out and hitting and rebounding from the previously ejected stellar materials.
The dark spot and filament are not connected to the nebula; they are part of the ISM. A lot of the visible glow comes from dust heated by the stellar wind. This is not a Supernova remnant -yet! but one day it will explode in a massive supernova event. The progenitor star ( WR136) was originally about 50 times the mass of our sun and about half of that now forms the nebula .

If you get chance to look through a decent sized telescope under a dark sky, it's quite a sight, I did this a few months ago through a 30" Dobsonian under Bortle 1 skies in New Mexico and it was great !
The outer ( blue) shell is sometimes difficult to image, and in this image, I've used Ha , and OIII filters to image this, with RGB for the stars.

Also of interest in this image is the very faint but almost perfectly spherical planetary nebula known as the "Soap bubble" nebula (bottom left in this image). This was only discovered in 2008 by amateur astronomer Dave Jurasevich.
I hope you like it.

Techy stuff:
Ha ( 3nm)  27 x 900 s
OIII (3nm) 43 x 900 s
R,G, B  each 30 x 30 s
Scope : Planewave CDK14 with 0.6 reducer (f4.2)
Mount : AP 1600 GTO -AE
Camera : QHY 600 SBF
Location : dark Sky New Mexico, Animas, NM

‍ ‍Name: Richard Whitehead