The Wizard Nebula - Urban Astrophotography

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.

Askar 130PHQ: September 2024

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!

*WBPP took 11 minutes 59 seconds to integrate 30 Optolong L-Quad Enhance (RGB) subframes.*

*WBPP took just over two hours to integrate 240 Optolong L-Ultimate (Ha/OIII) subframes.*

*WBPP took 1 hour 24 minutes 2 seconds to integrate 240 Askar D2 (SII/OIII) subframes.*

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.

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!