
It was early fall and I was eagerly anticipating the rise of Andromeda in the night sky so I could start gathering multiple nights of narrowband and broadband data for my 2023 version of our nearest galactic neighbor. In a rare success, I got the telescope set up and aligned before M31 rose over the trees in my backyard, so I started looking for an alternate target to pass the time. Through one of my trusty asto apps on my phone, I settled on the Sadr region in the constellation of Cygnus, which I'd never observed or imaged. What an amazing part of the sky it turned out to be! The Sadr region surrounds the star.....you guessed it, Sadr (formally gamma Cygni). A close nieghbor at just 1800 ly away, the star Sadr, the name derived from Arabic word for "chest," is shown at the center of this image and is a supergiant star ~150X the radius of our own sun. The region around Sadr is also formally catalogued as IC1318, and is an area in space occupied by diffuse hydrogen emmision nebulosity. My image above captures the narrowband hydrogen-Alpha (H-alpha), and Oxygen-3 (OIII) emmision. This image was just 24 exposures at 300s (5min) for each exposure for a total of 2 hours of data. That's pretty short in the world of deep sky astrophotography, but I had to shift to my primary target, M31, after she rose. I can't wait for next year to revisit this beautiful region of the sky and put some more integrated exposure time into the imaging to bring out additional detail in the nebulosity.