One of my favorite things about this hobby is that inevitably you end up learning so much about what your are looking at, and that leads to further curiosity.  I chose this dark nebula region in Cepheus simply because it looked cool to me.  Upon researching the area for this write up, I learned of the presence of Gyulbudaghian's Nebula on the far left side of my image.  What a fascinating area it turned out to be!

Gyulbudaghian's Nebula (gyool-bu-dah-ghee-an), discovered by Armenian astronomer Armen Gyulbudaghian in 1977, is a little-known variable reflection nebula.  This nebula changes brightness and shape over many months or years, which is a shockingly short period in the astronomical time scale.  The nebula is a Herbig-Haro object and at its center lies the variable Herbig AbBe pre-main sequence star PV Cep.  This is a newly formed star that is surrounded by a rotating disk of material.  At right angles to this disk are two jets of material, streaming away from the star at high speeds. 

In the below inverted luminance image, the northern jet is clearly visible including a huge stream that is escaping the region and interacting with the local stellar medium causing the massive swirl over the object.  The southern jet is mostly obscured by a dense dark nebula but still partially visible in the image. 




The region around the reflection nebula is classified as HH 215 and the reflection nebula itself is classified as GM 1-29.  The object lies roughly 1,600 light years away from us.  Apparently, from what I gather it is in a particularly bright phase of its cycle.

Again, this is with my TOA150 scope at Sierra Remote Observatory.  I am loving the dark skies and trying to shoot broadband only whenever the moon is below the horizon.  This time I tried to minimize the processing steps.   I feel like I have been trying to do too much lately with all the new tools available, and that's possibly why I am stuck on gold arrows.  All frames are 10min each and were unguided.

This was a very basic workflow.  For luminance - DBE, small application of BlurXTerminator, Star removal, not to aggressive GHS on starless, stretch stars separately and re-screen back in and finally light NoiseXTerminator.  For RGB - Linear Fit, Combine, DBE, SPCC, Light BlurXTerminator, slight saturation boost, add the luminance layer and a bit of green SCNR to clean up the stars.  Some minor contrast boost in Lightroom to finish it off.

I hope you enjoy this one.  Thanks for stopping by.