This past week, my astrophotography imaging project was a very faint nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia; its informal name is The Ghost Nebula. In all, I collected 13.7 hours of data through the 130mm f/5 astrograph, fitted with a quad-band filter and an unmodified Canon 6D camera; I discarded 10% of the frames. So, below you see the composite of 11hrs 18min (117 frames) of 6-minute IC 63 images. I ran the final image through the Topaz Denoise AI standard model.
IC 63 is a star-forming molecular hydrogen cloud. Embedded in the cloud are young hot stars that are ionizing their birthplace. Despite all that radiation, at 550 light years away from us, the nebula is very extensive but has a very low surface luminosity that makes it a challenging object to record.
I showed this image to Susan who always indulges my astrophotography adventures. “What do you think?” I asked. “Very appropriate for Halloween,” she answered. I love this gal!
