I have been enjoying the challenge of capturing and processing planetary nebula, I'm not sure I can do the beauty of them real justice, I learned many new techniques, a good number I need to develop on.

I had planned to try and get 30 hours of data, but having just added it up to 16hours I don't think the extra would improve things with my light polluted skies.

I captured this over the 13/14/15/16/20/21 May 2020

Information on Sh2-174 is scarce, but I have managed to grab exerts that I have put together for some background information: -

Sh2 -174 is a planetary nebula visible in the constellation of Cepheus

A strange nebula in deep space shines like a cosmic rose unveiled just in time for a past Valentine's Day.

It is one of the northernmost planetary nebulae of the celestial vault; it is located about 3 ° north of Alrai , the γ Cephei and is visible in long exposure photos. Its strongly northern declination means that it can be observed almost exclusively from the northern hemisphere , where, on the other hand, it is circumpolar up to the tropical latitudes.

A planetary nebula is one of the last stages of life for most mid-sized stars. Once a star runs out of fuel, it begins to collapse in on itself, creating the clouds of red and blue in the photo.

As the star sheds layers, it forms into a white dwarf — a densely packed star that has the mass of the sun, but is stuffed into a volume about the size of the Earth.

Usually the white dwarf can be found very near the centre of the planetary nebula, but in the case of Sh2-174 it is off to the right.

The white dwarf star appears as a very blue star in the centre of the blue region of gas in the new image. The off-kilter star arrangement is likely the result of interactions between the nebula and its surroundings.

The cloud, catalogued as a generic emission nebula in the sixties , never showed signs of star formation in progress, nor was the ionizing star of its gases known ; during the nineties the hypothesis was put forward that it was a planetary nebula, the central star of which over time slipped out of the gaseous envelope created by itself, since its dimensions were too small to be an H II region , but comparable to those of a normal planetary nebula. This ionizing star would be the white dwarf catalogued as GD 561, placed outside the cloud. The distance, from which the dimensions were derived, was obtained by studying the radial velocity , and is indicated around 300 parsecs (about 980 light years ).