The Ghost of Cassiopeia (IC 63)

Overview

Another cool nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia often called the Ghost of Cassiopeia. It’s an emission nebula, but most of its brightness comes from the light of Gamma Cassiopeia, the fourth star in the constellation. This object isn’t super far away either at only about ~550 ly from us. Fun fact tho, the Gamma Cass is a blue/white supergiant star that is 19 times more massive and 65,000 times more luminous than our Sun. I like this target, not just because of its ghostly appearance, but because it always reminded me of the scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where the Nazgul chase the hobbits across the Shire.

Link to learn more: https://esahubble.org/news/heic1818/

I collected the data back in October and have been slowly worming my way through processing it as this is the first time I’ve learned that really bright stars can create a lens flair-esq issue with light fraction that took some time to figure out how to better neutralize out of the image. The total integration time for the project was just a little over 36 hrs of collected data across the three narrowband filters.