vdB 133 is a nebula surrounding and lit by 44 Cygni, a 6th magnitude star. It consists of both a reflection nebula GN 20.29.1 and the HII region LBN 076.41-01.45. 44 Cygni is an F5Iab star. Much whiter than most stars that illuminate reflection nebula. It may be in front of the nebula as the color is about that of the star rather than blue that is usually seen due to scattering from starlight passing through the dust and gas. F5 tells us it is a somewhat hotter star than our sun. The Iab means it is in the supergiant class and the ab that it is of intermediate luminosity, a means luminous while b less luminous so ab is in the middle someplace. A famous Iab star is Betelgeuse.
44 Cygni is listed at about 1600 light-years so that is likely the distance to the nebula as well. The whole field is full of HII emission but for some reason, I didn't pick it up. I had a lot of red airglow that night which likely helped hide it. Since I was after the reflection nebula I didn't worry about its absence.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| HD 196819 is a magnitude 7.5 K3III (orange giant) star in Cygnus SSW of Deneb located about 2500 light-years away according to Hipparcos data. It is rather rare for such a star to illuminate a reflection nebula. In this case, it creates a rather yellow orange nebula rather than the blue color usually associated with reflection nebula. The Nebula is known as vdB 136 as well as GN 20.36.5. The field has lots of H alpha emission of warm ionized hydrogen gas. That has to be illuminated by a super hot blue star in the area though. The bluest star above BD+41 3833 is a B8 star at a bit less than 2600 light-years by Hipparcos. It may be providing the needed UV radiation. Only a guess as I couldn't find anything definitive.
The field is full of bright and dark nebulae. I gave up trying to identify them when I found many dark nebulae centered on bright HII emission and bright nebula centered on dark obscured regions.
The night, like many in August, was very hazy. This tends to weaken faint blue light to the point I can't recover it. Most images of this area show a faint blue haze over the field. Apparently, my haze absorbed that blue haze. I gave up trying to bring it out as it was just too noisy. I tried many nights to capture this one over 5 years but the sky gods had it in for this one over and over again. After three nights of mostly failure last August I finally got this weak data. I had good nights but as soon as I'd move to this object the sky gods would send in fog, clouds, smoke or something to kill the attempt. I have two or three others that have met with similar sky god interference that I've never gotten anything worth processing on so at least this one has something. Not what I wanted but it will have to do.
For some reason, nearly all images of this field put south up. I decided to stick with my usual presentation of north up which makes it upside down compared to most images of this field on the net. Most, however, are much wider field views.
The haze put halos around the stars I had problems dealing with. Since blue light scatters best even white stars like the G0 HD 197037 in the upper left corner had severe blue halos not matching their true color. I could deal with most but that one was just too severe at magnitude 6.8. The blue dart coming in from the bottom left of center is caused by 9th magnitude SAO 49897 just off the edge of the chip. I sometimes clone these out but since blue was so rare in this image left it in. The star is slightly red so why it created a blue spike I don't know.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=4x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| VdB 142 is classed as a reflection nebula. It is part of a huge open cluster in Cepheus called IC 1396. This is both a cluster and the hydrogen gas it formed out of, somewhat like NGC 7380. Though this complex is far larger, almost as large as the Veil complex. This hydrogen cloud has areas too dense to glow so they show up as dark nebulae. If a star is in a dark nebula it lights up this dense dust forming a reflection nebula. The dark complex coming across the image from the right to the left is often called the "Elephant Trunk Nebula." Inside it near the left end, by a bright blue star, is the reflection nebula vdB 142 though the name often is used to refer to the entire "Elephant Trunk". The trunk is formed when the solar wind of a one or more supermassive stars hits a dense region where star formation is likely occurring. The contact point of these two usually shows as a bright red region, brightest right up to the dark region as is the case here. Sharp-eyed viewers will see two very small Bok globules near the top of the photo a bit left of center. They are close together and each close to a star, one blue, one orange. Individual stars may be forming there. Other famous examples of elephant trunks are the "Pillars of Creation" in M16 the Eagle Nebula made famous by a Hubble image and the Horsehead nebula in Orion. You can read more about this object and see a photo taken at the US Naval Observatory at: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011011.html
No slam on the Naval Observatory, but I think my shot is prettier than theirs.
14" LX200R @ f/10, Ha=3x30' L=6x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB142VDB142, | 
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| vdB 145/GN 21.41.8.03 is a small reflection nebula around the star 8th magnitude F2II-III or A7 star HD 206887 in northeastern Cygnus. I was surprised to find such a difference in spectral class for the star. Color in my image is rather red for an F2 star so I tend to break with SIMBAD and go with the A7 classification I found in http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/121/4/2148/fulltext/200462.text.html as it better fits what I'm seeing in my image. There's even less information on the nebula itself. I found no distance estimates at all for the star or nebula. In fact, I found very little at all on it. It seems the Rodney Dangerfield of reflection nebula with nearly everyone ignoring it. It is rather overshadowed by far more spectacular nebula in the area. The glare from such a bright star on such a small nebula doesn't help the situation.
Again weather took its share of photons. I again had to throw out more data than I used though did manage to get 10 somewhat of usable frames. I think, while the color data is thin due to a lot of clouds, the color isn't skewed as much as in some other images taken about this same time. The luminance data is hurt by the clouds so the image doesn't begin to go as deep as I'd wanted. But it did hold down the glare from the illuminating star so that helped.
This is my first October 2013 image so I am making progress with my backlog thanks to all this rotten weather in 2012 and continuing in 2013. The rest of 2012 was poor so I should make a lot of progress this summer.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
VDB145L4X10RGB2X10.JPG
| The nebula vdB 152 has other catalog numbers but no common name I know of. This is a very odd object still not well understood. It wasn't discovered until 1979, that's how faint it is. It is a column of dust, a molecular cloud to use the correct term. This is cold gas and dust, cold enough nothing is ionized so rather than existing as a plasma like most nebula (the Orion Nebula for instance or the two in my last update) the stuff in the cloud is ordinary molecules much like you'd find here on earth. In this case, they are very cold as this one is thought to consist mostly of frozen hydrocarbons. Really frozen, like colder than liquid nitrogen.
Normally in a reflection nebula, the illuminating star isn't hot enough to have much ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light is what heats up the cloud and ionizes it to glow as a normal nebula. Since a reflection nebula shines only by light reflected from the star the star can't have much ultraviolet light. But not in this case. This star is very hot and emits mostly ultraviolet light. But this cloud has virtually no gas in it, just frozen hydrocarbons. They are too heavy for the light to heat and ionize. But when hit with strong enough ultraviolet light these compounds can glow much like some minerals do when hit by ultraviolet light. It is a combination of red scattering from galactic starlight (not the light of the blue star) combined with the slight red luminescence of these compounds when hit by 2200 angstrom ultraviolet light from the star that gives it its blue color. We are dealing with a very faint object here, except for the blue part. That is bright enough to see visually in a large scope.
This shot needed 90 minutes of luminance data for the image and 40 minutes in each color binned 3x3. I've never done this before but it was necessary due to how faint this guy is.
While some of you might think this like the "Pillars of Creation" in M16 that's not at all what's going on here. The blue star at the tip is not related to the molecular cloud at all. It just happens to be passing through it right now. They are moving very different directions and speed in space. It is just a coincidence we are living at the time they collided. Actually, that was about 1700 years ago.
There's not much on the net about this guy except a few very deep scientific papers that I waded through at least in part. I soon was in over my head most of the time. A shot of it that was in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the day is at: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070614.html It is supposedly in color but the nebula shows very little. I don't know why except the photographer likely used the normal mix of color to luminance data which isn't enough in this case. I'm just guessing here however as that detail isn't provided. That image has south up while I usually have north up as in this case.
This was taken with my old filters that had a rather nasty halo problem. I need to retake it with current filters to clean up these halo issues. For now, this will have to do.
14" LX200R, L=9x10' RGB=4x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB152VDB152, | 
VDB152_9X10RGB4X10X3.jpg
| vdB 155/LBN 524 is a reflection nebula in Cepheus just southwest of the far more famous Cave Nebula. Otto Struve, http://cdsbib.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/cdsbib?1962PASP...74..474S , lists its illuminating star as HD 216658 which is the star to the lower left (southeast) of the center of the nebula. The star near the center is HD 216629. This is the star van den Berg listed as the coordinates for the nebula. Though he never actually claimed it to be the illuminating star, just the star at the center of the nebula. He always used a the centermost star for the coordinates. While I found no distance estimate for the nebula itself (see below) or HD 216658 I did find in The Sky a distance estimate for HD 216629 of 173,332,000 AU which works out to about 2741 light-years. While there are several different estimates for the distance to the Cave Nebula (Sh2-155) they cluster about 2,800 light years. Most sources consider Sh2-155 and vdB155/LBN 524 to both be part of the Cepheus OB3 association. If HD 216658 is the illuminating star it may also be at about the same distance. It is slightly brighter as seen from earth, magnitude 8.9 versus 9.3 and is hotter being a B0.5V star. I suspect they may both be involved but that's just my speculation.
Another paper http://iopscience.iop.org/0067-0049/110/1/21/ indicates LBN 524 is part of the Cepheus OB3 association at 730 parsecs or 2400 light years. Since the Cave Nebula is also considered to be related to the OB3 association it would seem these distance estimates have a rather large, but not unexpected, error bar.
It is an interesting coincidence that while this reflection nebula, likely part of the same complex as the Cave Nebula, is vdB 155 while the Cave Nebula is Sh2-155. I found that very confusing as I wrote this -- which 155 is which kept tripping me up.
The outskirts of Sh2-155 is seen in the upper left of my image though doesn't overlap my image of the Sh2-155. At least one more frame would be needed to connect the two. You can find many wide-angle images of the area that do show both.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10' (needed much more but weather wouldn't cooperate), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| The large nebula extending well beyond my image is the reflection nebula LBN 111.05-12.46 aka DG 191 aka LBN 534. It is located in Cassiopeia. The B8V star HD 222142 illuminates the blue reflection nebula vdB 158. Though many consider vdB158 as the same as the far larger cloud LBN 111.05-12.46 this is incorrect from what I found. Are they two separate objects or is HD 222142 in the larger cloud but only illuminating the smaller nebula? I found only one estimate, in the Italian Wikipedia, of the distance to vdB158 saying it is about 440 parsecs away (1435 light-years). I don't know if this is meant to apply to the larger cloud or just the blue nebula around HD 222142.
Also in the image is the planetary nebula PK110-12.1 down in the lower left corner of my frame. One paper puts its distance as 13,620 light-years. I expect there are too many significant digits to that distance estimate. If correct then the nebula has a diameter of about 2.25 light-years.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1992A%26AS...94..399C/0000399.000.html
There are quite a few galaxies in the image if you hunt for them. All NED lists are from the 2MASS IR survey. NED shows no redshift nor magnitude data for any of them. The majority aren't in NED being anonymous as far as I can tell.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=7x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| VII Zw 140 is described as a "Blue post-eruptive multiple (elliptical) ring spiral, with compact elliptical core" according to the CGPG. Though it is slightly red in my image it does look blue to the eye. Redshift puts it about 150 million light-years from us. Two Tully-Fisher measurements are in close agreement saying 160 million light-years. This makes it about 65,000 light-years across its largest diameter. NED classifies it as (R)SA(r)ab with a Seyfert 2 core. The structure is surprisingly heart-like in its inner ring though the outer ring is only slightly oval. It is found in northern Lynx.
Unfortunately, the field is just close enough to the Zone of Avoidance that there's little on the other objects in the field. Only two other galaxies have redshift data. MCG +10-11-028 is the SBc galaxy to the east of VII Zw 140. It is listed with a redshift distance of 160 million light-years making it likely part of the same local group as VII Zw 140. To the west is MCG +10-11-010 which is much more distant at a bit over a half billion light-years so over 3 times as distant. It looks like a barred disk galaxy SB0/a would be my guess.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VII Zw 140UGC 03789, SBS 0715+594, CGCG 286-010, CGCG 0715.2+5928, CGPG 0715.2+5928, MCG +10-11-021, 2MASX J07193089+5921184, 2MASS J07193093+5921183, GALEXASC J071930.78+592118.5 , IRAS 07151+5926, IRAS F07151+5926, AKARI J0719317+592119, LDCE 0506 NED002, PGC 020679, UZC J071930.8+592119, NVSS J071930+592118, LGG 143:[G93] 001, [MGD2014] 0715.1+5926, VII Zw 140, | 
VIIZW140L4X10RGB2X10.JPG
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| VII Zw 190 is a blue ring galaxy 290 million light-years distant and 60,000 light-years across in Camelopardalis 10 degrees west of M81 and M82. I can find nothing on it but a paper on galactic coordinates and another on galactic radial velocities.
Ring galaxies like this fascinate me but all too many are like this one with no one looking at them trying to explain how this structure is created. Rings tend to be blue the area between the ring and the core isn't blank like it often appears and is usually quite red as it is in this case. The core is usually made of old population II stars same as the cores of most galaxies. We seem to see all of them near face on. This bothers me. We should see them from all angles. If the ring is just a sphere of stars seen like we see the edge of a bubble I'd think we'd still see some hint of the sphere, not just the red region between. Still, the sphere explains why all are seen nearly "face on". If anyone knows a paper or two on these that can explain why most all seem face on please let me know. Or an example of one seen at an obvious narrow-angle. I've not found one.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
VIIZW190L4X10RGB2X10CROP150.JPG
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| VII Zw 279 or how to write several paragraphs with nothing to write about. But I like to type so here goes, well, nothing much.
As I've mentioned before, ring galaxies in which the ring has no apparent connection to the core but for a rather even, faint, disk fascinate me. How is such a structure formed? VII Zw 279 is yet another galaxy of this type. I assumed there'd be something on it but except for a listing in a catalog of catalogs, I couldn't find a thing on it. Other than it is a 17.0 magnitude ring galaxy. The CGPG says of it "Red, circular ring galaxy." I saw that red mentioned which caught my interest as rings are usually blue not red. After I processed the image it was indeed blue. I checked the POSS II plates which also show it as blue. I found no other sources of color data but the POSS plates. I assume the red refers to the core which usually is rather red in these galaxies. Though when I checked the POSS I plates the ring looks neutral to faintly red in color. That may be the cause of the red remark. Why the difference I don't know. NED classifies it as (R)SA0^+^.
The galaxy is located in Draco though the western 40% or so of the image is in Camelopardalis. The field is only 10 degrees from the pole. Not one galaxy in the field has a redshift value at NED, not even VII Zw 279. So I have no idea how distant it is or how big it is.
Below and left is a strange looking galaxy that sort of reminds me of a horseshoe crab with its tail cocked to one side. It isn't in either NED or SIMBAD. Its coordinates are 09h 29m 52.3s +80d 15m 8s. It is at the bottom left of the cropped image. Is it two interacting galaxies? There are a lot of very faint, likely very distant galaxies in the field but I found nothing on any of them worth mentioning.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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