NGC 6960 is the Western part of the Veil Nebula - a supernova remnant that spans 3 degrees in the constellation of Cygnus. NGC 6960 is known as the "Witch's Broom" as well as the "Filamentary Nebula". This portion of the Veil Nebula appears to pass through the bright 4th magnitude binary star, 52 Cygni. This image shows about 1 degree of NGC 6960's approximately 1 1/2 degrees.

In this image, North is to the Left. This image is cropped to 95% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Lumicon telecompressor
Focal Length	1100mm
Focal Ratio	f/5.5
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2
Guiding	80mm f/11 guidescope with PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 20Da
Exposure	326 subexposures of 180 seconds at ISO 800 - over 16 hours total exposure
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	July 25, 26, 28 and August 2, 3, and 4, 2011
Temperature	7/25-61F, 7/26-60F, 7/28-63F, 8/2-65F, 8/3-59F, 8/4-58F
SQM Reading
Seeing
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking and digital development. Photoshop CS5 used for flat fielding, curves, color correction, saturation adjustments, star shrinking, noise reduction, and high pass filter. HLVG for additional color correction, Carboni Actions for additional saturation adjustments and noise reduction.
Notes	This image was very difficult to process, primarily due to a gradient problem I've been having with my camera. I was able to capture some good detail, but the result is a bit less than I had wanted, particularly given the many hours of imaging I put into it.