This is
NGC7380, commonly called the
Wizard Nebula. It is a young open cluster in Cepheus, located about 8.5 kly from us. It is about 20 ly across its longest extent. I find the estimated ages of these nearby nebulae to be fascinating, as this one is about 4 to 12 million years old. That's a relatively young age as far as interstellar objects go.
I acquired this image over the same nights as
this one of Melotte 15, and I have included in that posting many acquisition and processing notes that also apply here. In particular, I am exploring the use of StarXTerminator as well as NoiseXTerminator. I followed some different steps with this image, particularly in how I processed the stars a bit more before recombining them. I had some residual green stars, and that color was suppressed by taking the stars alone, inverting, applying SCNR, then inverting again. Frankly, in the absence of true RGB colors of the stars, I simply wished to mostly suppress their colors altogether as the subject of color is obviously the nebula.
One aspect of the Wizard Nebula that I've enjoyed is how well so many colors can be drawn out of SHO processing. I notice that many imagers tend towards removing green from this palette, and I typically do as well, however this one, in my opinion, looks nice with a little bit of green included since it blends into the rest of the palette.
You may wish to zoom into this image to observe the nice resolution I was able to achieve with (1) the 2000 mm focal length of the TS RC10, (2) a decent amount of integration time per channel and (3) some judicious deconvolution of the starless image.
I'll keep my comments brief on this one since so many of my notes linked above apply here. Thank you for your attention, and I hope you enjoy!
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