The Helping Hand Nebula - VDB 9, VDB 7, LDN 1357, 1355, 1358 (John Dziuba)

The Helping Hand Nebula - VDB 9, VDB 7, LDN 1357, 1355, 1358

This interesting region of reflection and dark nebulae in the Cassiopeia constellation is commonly known as the Helping Hand. It gets this name from the dark nebula at the top of the image, LDN1357, which looks like an open hand. Just to the left of this feature is the yellow giant star SU Cas which is illuminating the blueish reflection nebula VdB9. SU Cas is roughly 1,400 light years away and roughly 19 times the mass of the sun.

On the bottom left of the image lies another bright star system, RZ Cas, which is only about 200 light years away from us. This is a binary eclipsing star system which is very interesting and popular to observe. Every 29 hours, the smaller dimmer star in the two star system passes in front of the larger and brighter star which causes the system appear to dim. From our vantage point, RZ Cas looks like a single star and the orbital plane of the two star is edge-on. As the eclipse occurs, the system appears to dim from a magnitude of roughly 6.6 to a magnitude of roughly 7.7. All of this happens over the course of only five hours with the bulk of the action happening over the middle three hours!

Adjacent to RZ Cas is another reflection nebula, VdB7. Although it visually lies close to RZ Cas, VdB7 is apparently not illuminated by RZ Cas but rather a much smaller nearby star.

This whole region is rather dim and difficult to image. It requires a long integration time, ideal conditions and careful processing to reveal the fine structural details and subtle colors. Fortunately, a stretch of ideal conditions at SRO allowed me to collect enough high quality data to create a compelling image.

I hope you like it, and thanks for stopping by

CS

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8546105
PixInsight job	HEWXK43QQITFVCVJ9M9OLS58E0AMDDQN
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	02h54m05s.314
RA (top/left)	02h44m15s.414
RA (top/right)	03h03m58s.433
RA (bottom/right)	03h04m28s.333
RA (bottom/left)	02h43m38s.813

Dec (center)	+69°13′36″.31
Dec (top/left)	+68°36′41″.62
Dec (top/right)	+68°37′11″.16
Dec (bottom/right)	+69°48′16″.89
Dec (bottom/left)	+69°47′46″.69

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