IC1396 is a fabulous and well known nebula complex in the Far Northern constellation of Cepheus and is about 2400 light years distant.  It is comprised of a huge cloud of excited hydrogen gas known as a HII region (pronounced H-two).  Some nice features include the Elephant’s Trunk nebula embedded in it.Full resolution (8Meg) image here (opens in a new tab): https://skastro.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/IC_1396_WF.jpg IC1396 Nebula in Cepheus Technical Details Imaged from my back yard in Nottingham, UK on the nights of 15 and 16th October 2023 when almost directly overhead. It consist of 54 x 240s exposures with a QHYCCD One Shot Colour (OSC) camera with a gain of 30 and offset of 0 through a Takahashi FSQ85 telescope with the 0.67 focal reducer/flattener.Sky conditions and transparency were both poor, as usual for the UK in all but the rarest nights of seeing.I hope you like it 🙂  IC1396 Annotated Finder Chart…

Collinder 399 or Brocchi’s Cluster is offered nicknamed “The Coathanger” for its striking resemblance to that wardrobe item! If you look at the stars in the middle of the image and it looks very much like a coathanger on its side. It is located within the constellation of Vulpecula – The Fox – within a larger asterism called The Summer Triangle. The Coathanger is a chance, line-of-sight effect and the stars that form the appearance of the coathanger are not physically associated with each other at all and range from 350 to 2300 light years in distance. The stars are backdropped against the vast clouds of glowing hydrogen that dominate the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. The Coathanger in Vulpecula Image Technical Data Uncompressed version of the image is here (opens in new tab).Image captured in my backyard in Nottingham, UK on Sunday 20th September 2020.  I used…

The M81 and M82 galaxies in Ursa Major showing the background Integrated Flux Nebula. These are a well known and popular pair of galaxies and can be seen with binoculars.  I’ve imaged them here in a very wide field with a DSLR camera lens – the Samyang 135mm connected to a G2-8300 CCD camera and filter assembly using Astrodon LRGB filtersThe cloudy dust that is visible is not passing cloud!  Rather, it is the extremely faint dust and gas that exists in the space between the galaxies – in intergalactic space.  Hence it is called the Integrated Flux Nebula or IFN.  It is extremely faint and is only visible with very long exposures and integration times.  Careful processing is needed not to inadvertently cut it out of the image. M81 and M82 and IFN Technical Data Imaged in my back yard in Nottingham in March 2020 with Samyang 135mm and G2-8300…