| Here is another urban
image taken by DEO from
my driveway's end.
This is my second attempt at this image as there was a full Moon in the
sky during my first attempt. The bright Moon increased the photon noise
substantially requiring a lot of detail destroying noise reduction. The
exposure for both images is the same, 225 minutes. The optical setup,
including the filter, was identical for both images as well. The second
image was taken with a full Moon in the sky and was a bit of an
experiment to see how far I can push my imaging into lunar phases that
make the sky brighter than normally usable. The excessive light
pollution was dealt with using
an Optolong L-eNhance filter and some processing to take care of the
gradient across the image. The object is NGC7380 also known as the
Wizard Nebula. According to Wikipedia - NGC 7380 is an open cluster discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. William Herschel included his sister's discovery in his catalog, and labelled it H VIII.77. It is also known as 142 in the 1959 Sharpless catalog (Sh2-142). This reasonably large nebula is located in Cepheus. It is extremely difficult to observe visually, usually requiring very dark skies and an O-III filter. Located 7200 light years away, the Wizard nebula, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380. Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer. The active star forming region spans about 100 light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon. The Wizard Nebula can be located with a small telescope toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus). Although the nebula may last only a few million years, some of the stars being formed may outlive our Sun. The first image below was taken with no Moon in the sky and the camera was rotated 90 degrees to the second, full Moon image. The image was rotated and cropped to keep the same orientation as the full Moon shot. Click on the first image to see a higher resolution version, then click again on the image to return to this page. |
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| New Moon Image | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| Full Moon Image | ||||||||||||||||||||
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