Hunting swans at dusk

A part of Cygnus at dusk
(Pentax K-5, Pentax-M 50mm 1.7, f/2.0, 180s (stacked), 50mm, ISO 3200)

Yesterday, poetically on Ascension day, I went out to shoot in what hopefully would be darker conditions.

I travelled to the Dijkgatsbos in North-Holland (52.889538 N, 5.069368 W). This is one of the places in The Netherlands with the least amount of light pollution. At least according to the charts. It also has ample space to set up your gear; considering it is only a half hour drive away from me, it really is an ideal shooting location!

Unfortunately, I knew my clear skies were going to disappear very quickly that day with a cloud front coming in from the west, giving me very limited shooting time. Translation: I could only shoot until about 1,5 hour after sunset.

I was hoping to make shoot a picture of the Milky Way, but that required quite long exposure times as well as properly dark skies (well past midnight). That wasn't going to happen, so I turned to shooting Swan ..or Cygnus.

I'm pleased with how this turned out! As always, annotated version after the break.
As you can see, shooting at dusk means that there is quite a bit of a gradient in the background. But you can still make out an awful lot of stars. I took 9 light frames with an exposure time of 20 seconds and 5 dark frames; all with the AstroTracer function enabled. Combined with DeepSkyStacker, that's an exposure time of 3 minutes.

After stacking I noticed two features in this image that I had not seen before: the M29 cluster and the Cygnus X-1 black hole. Here are the objects cropped from the original image (see if you can spot them in the big image!):

M29

Cygnus X-1

Especially M29 (or NGC 6913) looks the part, even cropped. It's like a butterfly, though some have called it a "stubby dipper" (after the big dipper, Ursa Major). Cygnus X-1 is a bit fainter, but you can just make it out to the right of the two red/orange stars that are set in the Tulip nebula. Shame you can't see said nebula here, but it requires much longer exposure times... and resolution.

Looks like I'm in need of some lenses with longer focal lengths.

All in all, it was a shame that the weather didn't hold up and I got to pack up at half an hour past midnight already. Looking at these results though, I'm convinced this is the best spot for me to shoot and I can't wait for proper clear skies!

Have you found M29 and X-1 yet? No? Let me help you with an annotated version.

A part of Cygnus at dusk (annotated)