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vdB152 The Dark Penguin, Michael Southam
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vdB152 The Dark Penguin

vdB152 The Dark Penguin, Michael Southam
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vdB152 The Dark Penguin

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

The Target
Van den Bergh 152 is the blue reflection nebula at the top left in the image. The blue light is from a young star that is scattered and reflected off the dust.The large dark nebula stretching down below vdB 152 is Barnard 175 or LDN 1217. It's opaque dust blocks most of the starlight behind it. These 2 nebula complexes form what looks like a penguin with vdB 152 forming the Penguin's head. Some of the faint dust is glowing in a dim red color forming an Extended Red Emission nebula (ERE). This complex is also called The Wolf's Cave and is located about 1,400 light years away from us in Cepheus. This area is part of a large molecular cloud that was called the Cepheus Flare by Edwin Hubble.

Image Planning
This image is probably the most planned image I have ever published. I used Stellarium as usual to frame the camera's field of view but I had to import the Stellarium view into PhotoShop and overlay several images I had found online to be sure I was framing both the dark and red portions of the image efficiently. After writing an APT script to image the target for the duration of the night, I just had to hope that I was afforded 2 nights of clear sky to image both the RGB and Narrowband data sets. It's rare that I devote so much imaging time at Cherry Springs to just 1 target but the time was well spent in my opinion. Very happy to have done some justice to the target at my first attempt.

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