Happy Halloween! It seems an appropriate day for my latest work, NGC 7380, also well known as The Wizard Nebula. I’ve always loved this nebula as I have an affinity for Wizards and fantasy literature and movies. This emission nebula is colored by glowing hydrogen and oxygen gases. It’s about 8 hours of exposure with RGB filters, and some “narrowband” filters that only let wavelengths of light through from Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms.
So do you see the Wizard? Upper left is his pointed hat. Following the arc down, you see the hands spread out, over a bubbling caldron. Takes a little imagination, but once you see it, you’ll never forget it! I even think I see a little face near the big “bubble” feature under the hat.
There is a little something “spooky” going on with this image. There’s a little loop above the Wizards right hand. Small at the end of an area of gas with a glowing edge.
The loop is very bright, and doesn’t show up in my Ha or OIII images, but it’s very bright in the RGB images. There’s a bit of a bubble feature here in some images I’ve found, and at first I thought perhaps it was a processing artifact. I went back to the original sub exposures, and it’s very clear, especially in the strong red and green color channels (you can see it in blue too, but blue is usually a lot fainter).
I’ve searched online and sent this to another atro-imaging friend. Honestly, if it weren’t Halloween, I might even have waited to publish this, because I really want to convince myself it’s a processing artifact. I shot the RGB data on October 25th, if anyone out there shoots the Wizard, I’d love to know if you see this too. Or… maybe… it’s a GHOST and it’ll be gone! Muhahahah…
Oh, almost forgot the tech details. This was taken with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 and their 0.77x reducer. Player One Poseidon-M camera with Chroma RGB and narrowband filters. Ha and OIII, both 3nm band pass. 8.7 hours total exposure time over three different nights.
I love the expression “Happy Holidays” because there’s a whole bunch of Holidays and they start with Halloween for me. So, let me be the first to say Happy Hallowe…. Holidays!