Steve Cannistra needs no introduction as one of the very best amateur deep-sky imagers on the planet – and he holds down a responsible day job too   When I first started imaging it was Steve’s name and web site that I first chanced upon, I discovered Rob Gendler quite a while later.  Steve’s work has always highly impressed me (especially as he did a lot of great stuff with the little Sky 90 refractor) – but this fantastic image of the supernova remnant CTB1 in Cassiopeia really does it for me – especially as this is my Nemesis object.  My light pollution makes this faint one right at the limits of what I can capture with the IDAS filter and RGB one-shot colour camera, and I have a bunch of very unimpressive faint red smoke rings to prove it.  However – I have far from given up on this object and I will return to it with the mini-WASP array and some narrowband H-alpha filtering – that’ll get the little blighter!

However, as you can see, Steve managed to get a great image of the little blighter quite a while back, and it is one of the best images of this object that I have seen.  It’s an interesting story how I came across CTB1 in the first place.  There was an article in the “Practical Astronomer” magazine called “Six little clusters all in a row” which described a bunch of open clusters in Cassiopeia lying close together that could be seen in the field of view of a low-powered scope.  But what was much more interesting than the clusters that were being discussed was the “half a smoke ring” right at the top of the black and white image that was CTB1.  It just struck a chord – I thought this was one of the best deep-space objects I’d ever seen – and I wanted to get a great image of it.  That’s probably why it has fought back at me so long and hard

Well Steve beat it, and here are the details to go with his image:
Date:  Ha- September 19, 2008;  RGB- September 23, 2008
Scope:  Takahashi FSQ106 at f5 on the Takahashi NJP Mount
Autoguider:  SBIG ST-402 with 60mm guidescope, focal length 227mm
Camera:  STL11K -20C
Filters:  Baader RGB filter set; Baader 7nm Ha filter, all 50.8mm unmounted
Exposures:  Ha 360′; R 60′; G 60′; B 90′.  Total exposure 9.5 hours
Post-processing:  Calibrated, aligned, and Sigma Clip combined in Maxim, followed by DDP in ImagesPlus (IP).  Further processing in Photoshop CS (16 bit)

You can see a higher resolution image on Steve’s site here.

Thank you for sharing a great deep-sky image with us Steve!

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