NGC 7380 is a relatively young open cluster of stars in the constellation of Cepheus, discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. The surrounding emission nebulosity is known colloquially as the Wizard Nebula, which spans an angle of 25′.
All nebulae are almost impossible to see with the naked eye, but using some dedicated astronomy equipment, some filters that only let in certain wavelengths of light and my astronomy telescope, we can image vast objects like the one show below.
This vast nebula spans approximately 100 light-years across. To put this in terms of our Moon’s size, which has a diameter of about 3,474 kilometers, the Wizard Nebula would be equivalent to around 2.88 trillion moons lined up end to end across its diameter.
Total Integration time: 12 hours
Moon coverage: 35%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
I took this image on 2023 using my one shot colour astronomy camera and my Skywatcher 200P telescope. Sitting nicely on my Skywatcher HEQ5Pro equatorial mount.
This was quite a tricky deep sky object to process and with a farily short integration time, it made it more difficult to reveal the Hydrogen gases around this nebula. You can see them here as I have processed them in a kind of rusty orange colour, but Hydrgoen is normally processed in red.
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