Overview
The Wizard Nebula (NGC 7380) is a glowing region of space about 7,200 light-years away. Named for its mystical, cloaked appearance, if you’ve got a good imagination then you might see a celestial sorcerer casting spells across the night sky. It’s actually a star-forming region home to young, hot stars that illuminate the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, creating the vivid colours we can see in this astrophoto.
Background
This has been on my hit-list for a long time, and I decided to seize the opportunity of a rare spell of consecutive clear nights to get it in the bag. There’s a good variety of gases in the nebula, so I collected 20 hours of Ha/OIII (using my Optolong L-Ultimate); 20 hours of SII/OIII (using my Askar D2); and just an hour of RGB for the stars (using my Optolong L-Quad Enhance). That’s 41 hours in total, which I collected over 10 nights. As usual I actually gathered a lot more than that, but I generally axe 30 – 50% of my initial subframes during pre-processing due to low quality. I only want the best ingredients!
Imaging details
| Date | 9 – 18 September 2024 |
| Location | Bristol, UK (Bortle 8) |
| Telescope | Askar 130PHQ Flatfield Astrograph |
| Camera | ZWO ASI 2600MC-PRO |
| Mount | Sky-Watcher EQ6-R PRO |
| Guide | William Optics 50mm Guidescope with 1.25″ RotoLock; ZWO ASI 120MM Mini |
| Control | ASIAIR Plus |
| Software | PixInsight, Lightroom |
| Filters | – Optolong L-Quad Enhance (RGB): 30 x 120 seconds (1 hour) – Optolong L-Ultimate (Ha / OIII): 240 x 300 seconds (20 hours) – Askar Colour Magic D2 (SII / OIII): 240 x 300 seconds (20 hours) |
| Total exposure time | 41 hours |
| Image credit | Lee Pullen |
Processing
I found the processing to be very tricky, and spent several hours battling the data. The Hydrogren-alpha was overpowering the other gases, which is fairly common, but for some reason it seemed particularly difficult to deal with. In the end I used a few PixInsight processes to save the day: DBXtract to combine the L-Ultimate and Askar D2 data into one SHO image; NarrowbandNormalization to fix the dominant green colour cast; and then SelectiveColorCorrection to mix up the colours into a palette I was happy with.
See below for a full video walkthrough of how I processed the image.
Source data
Previous version
After I finished the picture, I stumbled across a previous attempt. This one was from seven years ago. Sometimes progress in this hobby can seem slow, so it’s reassuring to see when you’re on an upward trajectory!
Seestar S50
Seestar S50 image to be added later…
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