Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse? (Howard Trottier)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)

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Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

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Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

This image of the Seahorse Nebula gives a closeup view of the head of the fanciful fish. While the entire nebula is almost startling in its semblance to a seahorse, it is not surprising that the impression may be lost in a closeup such as this, where the view may be too narrow to capture enough of the context of the whole. This field encompasses about a third of the nebula, and joining it to another frame of equal size would be sufficient to clearly evoke a seahorse, but I don't think this frame by itself is enough (I had in fact intended to do a two-panel mosaic, but didn't get enough data for the 2nd panel, and might try again for that next year!).

I laboured on the processing of this image for so long that I started to see all kinds of shapes in it, including the head and antlers of a moose, or a dog playing with a stick (is it just me?!). What (if anything) do you see in this nebular inkblot?

The image is from just over 17 hours of integration, divided roughly equally between luminance and RGB colour, acquired over the course of eleven nights from late May to late June. The plate scale is about 0.62"/pixel (after downsampling by 75% from the full resolution), and the field of view is just under 30' on a side.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6088760
PixInsight job	TGV6WC5LD69493XN0YKRA43AVRASWBZF
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	20h53m17s.650
RA (top/left)	20h55m27s.129
RA (top/right)	20h55m10s.550
RA (bottom/right)	20h51m06s.320
RA (bottom/left)	20h51m26s.519

Dec (center)	+60°19′01″.96
Dec (top/left)	+60°05′14″.39
Dec (top/right)	+60°35′00″.13
Dec (bottom/right)	+60°32′42″.38
Dec (bottom/left)	+60°02′57″.44

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Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

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Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

Nebular Inkblot: What do you see in this closeup of the Seahorse?

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