Sneak Peek: Wolf's Cave

Good evening! I usually post my personal images to Astrobin and Instagram with write-ups, but I haven't been in the habit of posting them here on Patreon. Toni M. suggested I at least give a heads-up here on Patreon when I post a new image, and I thought I'd do one better, I'm posting this image several days early for Patreon members, and will release it publicly on Friday.

This is my second finished deep sky image from Starfront Remote Observatories. I know that may sound weird since I've had a telescope there since July. You'd think I'd have dozens of images finished by now, but after creating my first light image rather quickly (The Heron), I've been collecting data, LOTS of data, on several projects at once. It's hard to know when to stop collecting data with so many clear nights down there.

The image above that I took of "Wolf's Cave" is 120 hours of data from 6 filters (Lum: 35 hours, Ha: 35 Hours, OIII: 20 hours, Red: 10 hours, Green: 10 hours, Blue: 10 hours). It is called Wolf's Cave because astronomer Max Wolf reportedly saw a cave feature in this region - not to be confused with the Cave Nebula, which is also in the constellation Cepheus. In any case, this kind of image is right up my alley. Lots of dim features to tease out, and every type of nebulae all in one scene. This image has a planetary nebula, a supernova remnant, several dark nebulae, and several reflection nebulae.

In planning and capturing this shot, I attempted the following:

-giving the 'toast nebula' in the upper-right enough breathing room, while also making it feel like it's trying to escape by putting it in that corner at that angle
-placing the most familiar object in the composition (vdB 152) in the center
-balancing the swoop of brown dust on the left with a swoop of red hydrogen on the right
-capturing enough OIII to bring out some OIII filaments in the dim background supernova remnant (G110.3 + 11.3)
-capturing enough LRGB data to give the dust features dimensionality and subtle color contrasts

I think I was mostly successful in these goals, and I plan to speak a bit more about this image in a YouTube video coming out Friday (+ early here for Seagull Tier and higher), but until then I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek post. It is already uploaded to the private staging area of my Astrobin here: https://astrob.in/kco70n/0/ if you'd like to see more of the technical details.

Clear skies, Nico