Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO (Michael Southam)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cepheus (Cep) · Contains: HD201344 · HD201429 · HD202214 · HD202380 · HD239582 · HD239605 · HD239618 · HD239626 · LBN 445 · LBN 449 · LBN 453 · Sh2-129

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Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

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Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

Sh2-129, also known as The Flying Bat (seen here in red) is a faint emissions nebula located approximately 2300 ly away in the constellation Cepheus. OU4, also know and The Squid Nebula, was only discovered in 2011 by French astrophotography Nicolas Outters hence the designation OU. OU4 is a reflection nebula that resembles a squid categorized by it's faint blue bipolar glow. The glow is caused by OIII emission from a triple star system located at its center.

I chose the subject based on convenience as It is perfectly placed in the sky to be imaged all night from my observatory at this time of year. The target proved tough to frame as the nebula is not shown in either SkySafari or Stellarium which are the 2 programs I use for framing. It also seemed the perfect target to image with the L-extreme filter in order to have the bast chance of pulling out the OIII that could easily be drowned out by the H-alpha of the Flying Bat. In order to help highlight the OIII, I employed the HOO processing technique from Cuiv's tutorial. This involves splitting the 3 color channels and recombining with red as H-alpha and a mixture of the green and blue channels for OIII.

Northeast Imagers
Skywatcher Esprit ED Super APO Triplet
AstroBin Platform open discussions community forum
Optolong L-eXtreme filter
Imaged with APT
ZWO ASI 2600MC PRO

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6268838
PixInsight job	WBOHO9QDQWKUQGEY209JIQHXA8SIQF70
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	21h11m55s.47
RA (top/left)	21h17m24s.82
RA (top/right)	21h18m44s.97
RA (bottom/right)	21h06m01s.60
RA (bottom/left)	21h05m32s.59

Dec (center)	+59°57′34″.9
Dec (top/left)	+58°45′05″.6
Dec (top/right)	+61°04′20″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°09′06″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°49′30″.8

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Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

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Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

Sh2-129 & Ou4 - Flying Bat Nebula and Squid Nebulae in HOO

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