Cassiopeia and Cepheus

As you may already know Cassiopeia was a queen of Aethiopia and wife of king Cepheus. These mythological characters were put together also in the night sky. And there is plenty of things at the border of these two constellations 🙂 This is maybe one of the most populated area in the northern sky, but not all of these treasures are available for visual observations. Emission nebulae are usually quite faint, and require dark sky plus some filters to be noticed. Even then only the brightest parts are visible and in rare situations some detail can be distinguished. But visual observations are just different that looking at pretty pictures. Even the slightest patch of light noticed visually under dark sky is always a thrill. And pretty pictures should be just pretty 😉

Large version https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-08-02-CasCep3.jpg

Probably most known item here is Bubble nebula next to M52 open cluster (upper left part of the frame), although at this pixel scale bubble is barely visible. Below it you can find Lobster’s Claw nebula. In the image top there is well known Cave nebula, and at the bottom another one – Wizard nebula. Whole area is rich in star clusters, and clouds of interstellar matter. Amazing fact about all these emission nebuale is, that if we would be inside such a cloud, then we could not see anything spectacular with naked eye only. These clouds are very faint and require long exposures to be revealed.

Large version https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Bub_HaRGB_fin_Annotated.jpg

Image technical data:

Date: 6-7 August 2019
Location: Tenerife, North
Telescope: Samyang 135/2 @ f/2.8
Corrector: none
Camera: QHY163M, gain 100
Mount: iOptron SmartEQ Pro
Guiding: 50mm guidescope + ASI290MM
Exposure: H alpha 50x120 seconds, RGB 40:30:40x30 seconds
Conditions: transparency good, Moon

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