M 78 (NGC 2068) Casper the Friendly Ghost

Well I finally gave up and accepted this is the best I can do... Probably not... This nebula is going to haunt me forever! (Pun intended) Messier 78, also know as  Casper the Friendly (not so friendly to me) Ghost, or NGC 2068, literally tested me like no other nebula. The cloud formation in the middle is supposed to be blue and I struggled over five nights and 1,326 light subs and could never draw it out. I was able to pull out the marble countertop look that the Spitzer Space Telescope got obviously without the great detail that telescope has! It was the toughest nebula yet. M78 belongs to the Orion B molecular cloud complex and is about 1,350 light-years distant from Earth. I absolutely appreciate the chunks of dark dust lanes throughout.

Fish Head Nebula (IC1795)

 The Fish Head Nebula is also known as the Northern Bear Nebula, is a star nursery where stars are "born". I really like it because it has some very dark thick dust lanes running throughout the nebula. The light emitted from the nebula takes 6,000 years to reach us - a simpler way of saying the distance to IC 1795 is 6K LY's. The young stars in this system are emitting high amounts of Ultraviolet (UV) light which causes the nebula to glow brightly (kind of like when we sunburn 😁). So I was "fishing" for a target to photograph (pun intended) a couple of nights ago and came across this fish. I liked it so much I stayed with it all night taking 854 sub photos to stack. 697 subs survived the "blurry" test and were ultimately stacked with 60 flats and 60 darks for noise reduction. 81% survival rate tells me the "seeing" (atmospheric steadiness) was pretty good over 7 hours of exposure time. Enjoy this beautiful creation!