Gorgeous!

Ty for sharing!

You sure got your 8 hours of exposure time over 2 nights—worth! We, the viewers, did too! Thank You!

Thank you for posting. Other than an extended exposure time, were there any other techniques used? Are the colors really available to be seen with the naked eye?

thats due to how our eyes function in low light. in low light they are more sensitive to green light so deep space objects all appear greenish grey. the camera on teh other hand can show the natural colors.

as for techiniques this is my workflow
setup and align telescope to the north star
move to the object
i use a small device called an asair plus to control the shoot. I program in how long i want each individual exposure to be and how many. in this case its 5 minute exposures and 100 exposures.

after the exposures are done I take special calibration shots that will be combined with the images

I then use specialized software that combines all the images and the calibration frame. the reason you need so many exposures is to reduce noise. your are dealing with object that are very dim so you have to do a lot of processing to bring out the object. teh calibration frames help keep noise from overwhelming the object
the i use the software to do whats called nonlinear stretching. basically bring out teh nebula while keeping the background dark

About 10 or more years ago, I spent a summer night on top of Mt. Pinos in California at a Star Party. A group of us were looking through two (2) 30-inch telescopes at the Veil Nebula using a 30 mm Pentax XW eyepiece, a 30 mm Leitz Planokular eyepiece, and a 40 mm Pentax XW eyepiece. It was a night which no one who was there and observed the Veil Nebula will ever forget.

amazing photograph. That is what your eye would see through the telescope and the eyepiece. Trust me -- seeing it with your own eyes is a jaw dropping event which knocks your socks off.