Revision 1/2/2023:
This is reprocessed from the same selection of subs as the original.  Numerous changed processes employed starting with altered WBPP, etc.  The new noise reduction, star reduction, blur reductions methods allows for a much better stretch.  The old methods created a pleasant image when viewed at planned scale, but if one pixel peeps, will see a very strong posterization effect, especially around the reflection nebulae.  These are much better presented with this revision no matter which scale one will want to look at this.  Also, I fixed some obvious gradients (I hope this is a fix).  Also, I present this with North up and West to the left as one might view it on Aladin.  I do believe the colors and the relative intensities of the stars, clouds, etc. are more accurate, if maybe a touch less dramatic than the original.  Also, with the new techniques, I feel that I can leave more of the stars than the previous version without interfering with the overall presentation.  So, still a little bit more towards accuracy.  I also adjusted the black point to bring out all of the fainter thin molecular clouds.

You may disagree with me, but I find that the new methods are not only making the images more pleasant to view, but they do less damage to the data and therefore I can see much more detail in the structures that I can almost always confirm when I compare the newly processed image from old data with images from much larger, better telescopes.

Previous Description:
LBN555 and LBN552 is a continuation of my tour of the dark clouds of the far north. These have rarely been presented on this site. But in my research, this area stood out in its complexity and density, as well as the general activity it contains. However, it is very far north and very far from those beautiful colorful sites to the south and east. This may be a reflection of the climate that I live in! I hope to add more light in the near future. But these dense cloud areas hold particular interest for me, since they also contain active star formation. This area has it all, though much is unseen in this presentation. Here I show it horizontally, as it could be seen by naked eye (if that were possible) when viewed at the high meridian. This one is visible all year in many northern location at 77 degrees north. Beyond the broad areas of faint, veil-like molecular clouds and very dense regions, there are three obvious reflection nebulae, two blue (right) and one, more yellowish (GN 21.00.4) near the center left. Otherwise there are some inklings of Herbig-Haro objects and the like in the densest parts of the clouds. In any case, this area is chock full of young stellar objects, HH objects, IR sources, etc. I also like the small cloud to the left that reminds me of Gumby, upside-down and waving hello to us. This smaller patch of discrete dense clouds reminds me of the clouds that include VdB141, The Ghost nearby NGC 7023.

This image is a combination of two nights effort. I am suffering through the short nights, as are many of you. I am also suffering from my being stupid and not recording which way I have been adjusting my backfocus, so the first night I actually made it worse. But I integrated both nights together to form what I hoped to be a deeper RGB contribution (kind of funny considering the target!) The second night I made a correction to the back space, which came out much better, though now I need to attack the slight tilt remaining. This second night was used as the luminance which gave me better stars and boosted resolution a bit. Not sure it was worth all that effort!

As you can tell, many of my targets are pretty far north. I have less trees that way and just south of me is town. But I am starting to look forward to imaging some of the more colorful targets coming up soon!