IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas) · Contains: IC 59 · IC 63 · LBN 620 · LBN 622 · LBN 623 · LBN 625 · PGC 2796488 · PGC 2796500 · Sh2-185 · gamma Cas nebula

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IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

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IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

The Gamma Cassiopeiae Nebula, aka the Ghost of Cassiopeia! I've seen a ton of hair-raising images of this nebula, but my northern sky was largely blocked out at my house in California -- here in Ohio, my northern sky is largely unobstructed, letting me go after so many northern targets

Just off the edge of this image is the bright star Gamma Cassiopeiae, also known as Navi, which is an eruptive variable star with a magnitude that ranges between 1.6 to 3.0. Navi is the bottom-center star of the recognizable W that is the Cassiopeia constellation. It lies about 550 ly away and is responsible for the red glow of the Ghost of Cassiopeia nebula; Navi emits massive amounts of radiation (it is 65,000x brighter than the Sun!) that energizes the hydrogen of the nebula.

The first time I processed this three weeks ago, it looked awful -- I took the image with the bright star Navi in it, hoping to do some clever processing to deal with the halo, but it was so bad that I didn't even try

I took another crack at it this weekend to try some other things. I ended up not using the RGB data at all and just did an Ha-only starless image, but then I remembered that I had taken a fair bit of OIII data on it too, so I made a bicolor HOO image instead that I'm actually pretty pleased with! I could add RGB stars, but they were kind of ugly anyway, so I just desaturated the red in the stars a bit to make them look more natural.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5517319
PixInsight job	3V00A75W2E3FWFMKU0E0QVZZPUBRDHSK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h59m13s.699
RA (top/left)	00h57m28s.990
RA (top/right)	01h01m30s.666
RA (bottom/right)	01h01m01s.476
RA (bottom/left)	00h56m54s.414

Dec (center)	+60°57′24″.79
Dec (top/left)	+60°38′14″.55
Dec (top/right)	+60°41′24″.55
Dec (bottom/right)	+61°16′31″.76
Dec (bottom/left)	+61°13′22″.71

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IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

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IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

IC 63 Ghost of Cassiopeia #1

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