This week’s Deep-Sky Image is provided by fellow PAIG forumite Peter Shah who kindly sent in this beautiful capture – The Ghost nebula, vdb141, in the constellation Cepheus.
Peter tell us that:
Van den Berg 141, the Ghost nebula is a challenging object for imagers. It is a faint reflection nebula in Cepheus close to the much brighter NGC7023, The Iris nebula. It is an area that requires hours of exposure time to pull out the delicate faint dusty regions. A dark site, long sub-exposures and good quality flats are crucial for pulling out the low signal emissions in this object. Equipment used was an f#3.8 AG12 Astrograph Newtonian and a Starlight Xpress SXVF-H35 full frame mono camera. Imaged in the U.K. grabbing a few frames at a time over several weeks between rain showers, conditions were variable with haze and poor seeing at times. Exposure times were 13 x 900 seconds of luminance, 9 x 530 seconds of blue, 7 x 600 seconds of red and finally 6 x 420 seconds of green.
Many thanks Peter for sharing this excellent image of vdb141 with us 🙂
Lovely shot, Peter…this isn’t usually shown in the widefield, but the context really makes it jump out. Nicely shot and processed….congratulations.