NGC 7023 Iris Nebula (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: Iris Nebula · NGC 7023

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NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

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NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

And now for something completely different (British comedy reference)... Here is my image of the colorful and unusual Iris Nebula (cataloged as NGC 7023). It is a reflection type nebula located 1,300 light years away from Earth in our northern sky in the constellation Cepheus. It spans a distance of about 6 light-years across. Unlike the more typical emission nebulae, which get their colors from ionized gases, this nebula is illuminated entirely by its bright central star SAO 19158. You can certainly see why it earned its name "Iris Nebula" from the pattern of violet petals in the surrounding dust.

These interstellar dust particles are about 100 times smaller than typical dust particles here on Earth. These small particles diffuse the star light resulting in the blues and purples we see in this image. And the dust is so thick in places that it blocks out surrounding stars. I'm glad we only have to deal with good old Earth-dust because it would probably be hard to clean if we had a bunch of interstellar dust in our houses!

I made this image from thirty-five 300-second exposures at 2312mm prime focal length through my Baader Neodymium skyglow filter, calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.

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This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
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This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
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Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5227997
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

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NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

NGC 7023 Iris Nebula

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