I present NGC 7380, a developing open star cluster 7200 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus. The cluster is embraced within it’s star-birthing nebula coined as ‘The Wizard Nebula’ (such cool name! ), which is about 200 light years of interstellar gas and dust across with an apparent visual magnitude of 7.2 from Earth. It was originally discovered by Caroline Herschel in the late 18th Century and will only last another few million years before it diffuses into the void.

Uncompressed image: http://nova.astrometry.net/image/4866445

In my attempt to steer away from ‘false’ colour palettes like those of the Hubble Telescope et al.., (which are a lot more striking in appearance) and to generate a “truer” colour palette, only the Luminance channel of this image consists of photons that were captured through a narrowband combination of ionized Hydrogen (H-alpha/H-beta) & Oxygen (O-iii). This ‘triad’ of ionized emissions underlies to a certain degree, each of the three primary colours in the human visible spectrum, which was captured through ‘2nd generation tru-balance’ broadband filters that selectively pass Red or Green or Blue photons. The Luminance channel was then used to enhance for the nebulosity in the three Colour channels, effectively rendering this final HORGB image.

As some of you know, I recently moved to New York where I image through some of the most light and chemically polluted, humid skies in the world. As if that’s not enough of a challenge for my Astronomy, I have to also deal with the uninvited addition of LED floodlight arrays in the parking lot encircling my backyard porch, this makes the background in my images very difficult to work with, amidst a plethora of other issues. Therefore, I can only envision how much more detail one could pull in from a proper dark site, like the one I grew up with in my backyard back home in Cyprus (...and even there, the darkness is slowly being decimated as of late).

Nevertheless, I’m still very happy with what little I captured over these last two nights (4.5 hours total integration) and considering the bad environmental conditions along with familiarizing myself with some new equipment and this novel workflow to acquisition and processing.

Looking forward to the next project, keep looking up 😊

Clear skies, Minos xx