Harry Potter and the Golden Snitch
NGC 7380 is an open star cluster surrounded by a collection of interstellar gas referred to as the Wizard Nebula.
This image consists of 29 hours of exposure from 436 images taken with a ZWO ASI2600MC camera and a Radian Ultra Quad-band filter.
Telescope is a Skywatcher Esprit 120ED triplet refractor at 840mm and f7. These were mounted on a SkyWatcher EQ6r Pro equitorial mount. ZWO OAG and ASI290mm mini for guiding. QHY Polemaster for polar alignment. Pegasus PBA for power mgmt and control of the dew heaters.
Image processed manually in PixInsight. Bill Blantan's HOO Normalization V4 was used to create the colors in this version of the image.
Located in the constellation Cepheus it is 7,200 Light-yeras from earth.
The Wizard has a very dim surface brightness making it difficult to image in broadband RGB. To do so requires a lot of long exposures in creating the desired signal-to-noise ratio.
Luckily it sits high in the sky all night long here in the hills of NC during the fall.
