Another couple of clear nights and another emission nebula in Cepheus. This is the Wizard Nebula, so named because if you flip the image upside down with a bit of imagination, you can see the profile of a wizard's face. The entire area is an otherwise dark nebular cloud, but the glowing region is a result of excitement from a newly born star cluster, NGC 7380, and more specifically, the twin stars just to the right of the fluorescing nebula, DH Cephei, a pair of massive O-type stars. The Wizard is about 8,500 light-years from us and is roughly 20 light-years across at its long axis. It is extremely difficult to see through an optical telescope as it is small and dim.
I captured the data for this image from our backyard here in Salado on October 8 and 9 nights. It is colored using the Hubble palette, with Sulfur II mapped to red, Hydrogen-alpha to green, and Oxygen II to blue. It is the result of about 7 hours of exposure through those three filters in a series of 600-second exposures using an Askar V telescope in its 600mm focal length configuration, an ASI3600MM-Pro camera with a cooled sensor, a ZWO AM5 mount with ZWO's filter wheel, filters, and focuser, and an ASI AIR Plus telescope-mounted computer. Processing was in Pix Insight.
This image is a landmark for me as the entire processing workflow was in Pix Insight with no need to use anything else. There are some amazing color and color masking scripts and processes in PI not to mention several powerful processes to manage the relative brightness and size of the stars, noise elimination, and structural controls.