This is the first light for my new Sigma 135mm lens. The setup is not yet complete: for instance the focus-motor is missing, and I did what I could manually, decent but not perfect.
I have to thank @Giulio Ercolani with whom, during the last days, I had an intense opinions exchange, that lead me to take the decision to buy this new lens. I am impressed by Giulio's competence in every corner of this marvelous hobby, and by his passion and dedication.

Coming to this picture, it was intended to be simply a hardware test session, but the sky was so good that I decided to complete the night with an incomplete setup. I suspend any technical judgement to when I will have a motor focused image, but the first impression on the Sigma is positive.

Located between  the California Nebula and the Pleiades, the Perseus Molecular Cloud is an object that can be matched with Orion Nebula, except that it shines in infrared instead that in the visible range. I was not expecting to find such an interesting target. The star formation areas, specially NGC1333 (see picture below), are spectacular, and I would like to go back to it with a longer focal.

The Perseus Molecular Cloud
Per MCld is a nearby (~1000 ly) giant molecular cloud in the constellation of Perseus and contains over 10,000 solar masses of gas and dust covering an area of 6 by 2 degrees. Unlike the Orion molecular cloud it is almost invisible apart from two clusters, IC 348 and NGC 1333, where low-mass stars are formed. It is very bright at mid and far-infrared wavelengths and in the sub-millimeter originating in dust heated by the newly formed low-mass stars.
It shows a curious ring structure that is visible in our image around the reddish B3, and in the maps produced by infrared telescopes like IRAS, MSX and Spitzer Space Telescope.

IC348 and the Brown Dwarfs
IC348 is a star-forming region in the constellation Perseus located about 315 parsecs from the Sun. It consists of nebulosity and an associated 2-million-year-old cluster of roughly 400 stars within an angular diameter of 20″. Based upon infrared observations using the Spitzer Space Telescope, about half of the stars in the cluster have a circumstellar disk, of which 60% are thick or primordial disks.
The young age of this cluster has allowed three low mass brown dwarfs to be discovered. These objects lose heat as they age, so they are more readily discovered while they are still young.

NGC1333
NGC1333 is a reflection nebula, discovered by Eduard Schönfeld in 1855. The nebula is visible as a hazy patch in a small telescope, while a larger aperture will show a pair of dark nebulae designated Barnard 1 and Barnard 2. It is associated with a dark cloud Barnard 205. Estimates of the distance to this nebula range from 980 to 1140 ly (300–350 pc).
This nebula is in the western part of the Perseus molecular cloud and is a young region of very active star formation, being one of the best-studied objects of its type. It contains a fairly typical hierarchy of star clusters that are still embedded in the molecular cloud in which they formed, which are split into two main sub-groups to the north and south. Most of the infrared emission is happening in the southern part of the nebula. A significant portion of the stars seen in the infrared are in the pre-main sequence stage of their evolution.

The nebula region has a combined mass of approximately 450 M☉, while the cluster contains around 150 stars with a median age of one million years and a combined mass of 100 M☉. Within the nebula are 20 young stellar objects producing outflows, including Herbig–Haro objects, and a total of 95 X-ray sources that are associated with known members of embedded star clusters. Researchers reported finding brown dwarf objects and ejected planets in the cloud.

NGC1465
It is a Hubble-type S0/a lenticular radio galaxy in the constellation Perseus. It is estimated to be 183 million light-years from the Milky Way and about 105,000 light-years in diameter. The galaxy is moving away from the solar system with a calculated radial velocity of approximately 4,000 kilometers per second.

(Descriptions excerpted from Wikipedia)


Figure 1: detail of NGC1333 excerpted from the main picture.