NGC 7380 (also known as the Wizard Nebula) is an open cluster discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. William Herschel included his sister's discovery in his catalog, and labelled it H VIII.77. It is also known as 142 in the 1959 Sharpless catalog (Sh2-142). This reasonably large nebula is located in Cepheus. It is extremely difficult to observe visually, usually requiring very dark skies and an O-III filter. Located 7200 light years away, the Wizard nebula, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380. Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer. The active star forming region spans about 100 light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon. The Wizard Nebula can be located with a small telescope toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus). Although the nebula may last only a few million years, some of the stars being formed may outlive our Sun.
| Exposure |
17@900 sec (4.25 hours) |
| ISO |
800 |
| Camera |
Nikon Z7 [8856 x 5504] |
| Optics |
Skywatcher Esprit 120mm Refractor, 840 mm focal length |
| Filter |
Radian Triad Ultra Quad-Band Narrowband Filter |
| Guiding |
Phd2 using a ZWO 224MC on an Orion 60x240mm Guide scope |
| Controller |
Images taken using Kstars on an Odroid-N2 (Raspberry Pi clone) |
| Location |
Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia. |
| Date |
2020-09-20 - 2020-09-05 |
| PixInsight Processing |
| WeightedBatchPreprocessing Script |
| Dynamic Crop |
| Automatic Background Extractor |
| ColourCalibration (both saturation and hue) |
| MultiscaleLinearTransform |
| HistogramTransform |
| CurvesTransformation |
| LocalHistogramEquilization |
| ColourProfile |
|
| Further tweaking for colour in Lightroom |
