V Aquila is a rather famous carbon star. I've often seen it visually as redder than more famous carbon stars. Though these stars are variable and their color changes through the cycle. It is a double star with a separation of 0.2" so don't expect to see it visually. Since the red color is so strong I assume the companion is much fainter than the carbon star. I can't find an estimate of the companion's brightness. Much about the star seems to vary with the source. I find even the same source saying its distance is ~400 parsecs and that its distance is ~1200 light-years when 400 parsecs would be about 1300 light-years. I don't trust either. Its B-V value varies as well but that may be due to where in the cycle it is measured. I've seen it red as a stop light and more orange than red. I have no idea where in the cycle it was when I caught it on September 12, 2010, UT.
Trying to capture its color as seen visually is difficult. Monitors are so limited that if it is red enough at the core it is way too dim compared to the background stars. If you brighten it red is already saturated so all that does is bring up green and blue turning it orange then yellow. I compromised leaving it dimmer compared to background stars than it really is. The color ratios are close to the RGB ratios.
The image is rather a composite. Background stars were 5 one minute images while RGB data was 9 one minute images. Even then the L went fainter with less noise than the color data. So I processed it as LRGB rather than RGB as I planned. V Aquila however saturated in red light so fast I was limited to 5 second exposures for it. I used 24 5 second exposures in each color to make an RGB image of the star which was then matted in over the LRGB version which was so saturated it was bright yellow-white.
14" LX200R @ f/10, see text for exposure, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VV, AQL, | 
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| VdB 1 is a reflection nebula complex just south of Beta Cassiopeia. Fortunately for my narrow-angle view, I didn't have to deal with it but did have to watch how I framed the image as it kept throwing nasty ghosts of itself into my frame. I finally found a ghost-free position. VdB1 is made up of 4 parts according to SIMBAD, vdB1a through d. Each part around a bright blue star. The position it gives for simply vdB1 is also that of vdB1d, that is around the northern star of a triangle of blue stars where the brightest part of the nebula is found. Working south and west, vdB1c is around the leftmost of the two remaining stars of the triangle and vdB1b around the one on the right. Far to the lower right and out of the cropped image but in the full image is vdB1a all by itself, somewhat of an outcast. Note they are lettered in Right Ascension (west to east) order.
More interesting to me however was the smaller complex system to the northeast. The lower portion is a large loop with V633 Cas at the upper end. North of it is what looks a lot like a miniature version of T Tauri, AKA Hind's Variable Nebula, SH2-238, vdB28, NGC 1555, et al. That T Tauri like star is V 376 Cas. The resemblance is likely because they are similar objects.
This whole region is bathed in dust. I suppressed much of it in exchange for better contrast of the nebulae and stars. Tom Davis' image of the entire area (east at the top) is at http://tvdavisastropics.com/astroimages-1_0000a7.htm .
The loop extending from V633 Cas is also known as GN 00.08.8. I can't tell if it includes the nebula around V 376 Cas or not. In any case, the loop seems related to CO outflow from an IR source, V 633 Cas B about 6" to the north of the visible star. Interestingly the star appears elongated by nebulosity in that direction though only a couple seconds of arc, not 6. The loop is interestingly bi-colored with parts near the star blue and other parts reddened. The best paper on this system I found dates back to 1991 (submission date). It can be found at http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/472/1/349/pdf/25551.pdf .
O'Meara says in his book "Deep-sky Companions: The Secret Deep" that the distance to V 633 Cas and V 376 Cas is about 1,900 light-years and that vdB 1 is assumed to be in the same molecular cloud so about the same distance.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB001VDB001, | 
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| vdB 012 is a yellow reflection nebula in southern Perseus less than a degree from NGC 1333. It is illuminated by HD 21110, a K4III-IV star, hence its color. It's likely the star is somewhat in front of the nebula so the nebula is reflecting some of its light rather than scattering its blue light as it would if it was well behind the nebula. My The Sky program says it is about 680 light-years distant. That would put the nebula at about the same distance. The entire field is full of the faint dusty light of the Perseus OB2 molecular cloud. I assume the nebula is just a portion of the cloud that happens to have a 9th magnitude yellow-orange star nearby. van den Brock referenced the nearest bright star for his objects. Technically vdB is HD 21110. GN 03.22.3 refers to the nebula itself though most prefer the vdB number.
Due to the dust of the OB2 cloud, I didn't expect to find background distant galaxies but many are in the image. Only four made the 2-micron survey. Though many other anonymous -- to me -- galaxies can be seen throughout the image. While the OB2 cloud is known for forming many new stars, I didn't find any Young Stellar Objects in my image. I expected at least a few. I found galaxies I didn't expect and didn't find YSO's I had expected.
The brightness of HD 21110 created a glare that made bringing out details in the nebula difficult. I didn't expect so much glare from a yellow-orange star. I usually get that from blue stars.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| HD 21291 is a B9Ia supergiant star that illuminates a nearby reflection nebula to the southwest. The combination is vdB 14. For the position, van den Berg used the illuminating star's position. Usually that star was in the nebula so that system worked but in this case, the star is so far from the nebula in angular distance I'd miss nearly all the nebula if I put it in the field or even used the published coordinates for vdB14 to center the image. While vdB14 is the common name for the nebula vdB nebula have other catalog names that do center on the nebula itself. So I figured I'd look that up and use that as my coordinates. Turned out it did have one other listing, GN 03.25.0, but that is just a catalog of catalogs so uses similar coordinates from the vdB catalog. SIMBAD shows no other designation for the object, certainly none even close to its actual position. I ended up manually centering it, something I rarely do any more.
The glare from HD 21291 is seen in the upper right corner. It is also known as CS Camelopardalis a pulsating variable star. Hipparcos puts it about 4,300 light years away. The reflection nebula is obviously at about this distance as well to be so strongly lit by the star. Because of the reflections, the star caused when nearer the field I had to off center the nebula to keep the glare and reflections to a minimum. No way could I escape the huge arc the star creates thanks to reflecting between the optical window of the CCD and the SCT's flat corrector plate.
There are 5 galaxies from the 2MASS in the image. All very faint and starlike without redshift or even magnitude data so I've not tried to point them out. It's a somewht pretty field but pretty barren otherwise. I can't even find any study of vdB14 that's been published. As there's no fine detail to this object I'm posting it at 1.5" per pixel.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME
http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/vdB/VDB014/VDB14L4X10RGB2X10-67.JPG
http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/vdB/VDB014/VDB14L4X10RGB2X10.JPG
http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/vdB/VDB014/VDB14L4X10RGB2X10CROP.JPG
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| The reflection nebula vdB 16 is part of a huge complex known as the Perseus Molecular Cloud or sometimes the Cloud of Perseus. It is a huge area of the sky full of dust, new star formation, emission and reflection nebula etc. that is seen when near an illuminating or exciting star. The cloud is listed as being about 900 to 1000 light years distant depending on the source I looked at. The star at the heart of vdB 16 is SAO 75942 a magnitude 9.16 F0V star that The Sky puts at about 2,500 light-years. Thus over twice as far as the cloud. If right it is an imposter for the star lighting up the nebula. The blue star above the nebula is HIP 16164, a magnitude 9.65 A0 star with a distance by The Sky of 1042 light-years. That is more reasonable and since the error bars for parallax at that distant are quite large it even fits the 900 light-year distance. So is it the illuminating star? I found nothing to answer this question.
While the nebula is considered part of the Perseus Molecular Cloud the cloud extends into other constellations. This nebula is actually in very northeastern Aries just south of Perseus and west of Taurus. The nebula is also known as [RK68] 10 and GN 03.25.3.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| vdB 24 is an interesting reflection nebula in Perseus probably illuminated by the star XY Persei, a 9th magnitude variable star that can dim down to magnitude 11. It is also a double star, an A2II and a B6e separated by about 1.3" of arc. Parallax puts the star at about 390 light-years. I would assume that is also the distance to vdB 24. Though I've found references to it being much further, 1,140 light-years.
The Holoea, from sometime back is a YSO (Young Stellar Object) which is a protostar just turning on. The Holoea was accompanied by a stream of gas it was somehow creating. The papers I looked at on it considered YSOs very rare. Yet there are 4 of them in this image! Two are easy to spot, the other two are IR objects though there's a hint of something around the eastern one of these two if you blow up my annotated image. I have labeled all 4 with a line drawn to the position for the YSO. The northernmost looks like a fairly bright star. It's far brighter in far IR frequencies. Below it is a rather white star that marks the position of the other visible YSO. Neither show any sign of a gas stream. There's no obvious object at the positions of the other two though they shine rather brightly in far IR light. The easternmost one shows a smudge on the POSS 2 IR film image that is much brighter than the smudge on my visible light image (I block IR from reaching the camera). I thought it just noise in my image but it is exactly the same spot as the smudge in the POSS 2 IR image. I see nothing in the POSS 2 IR image at the position of the 4th YSO however.
The image was taken over 3 very poor nights. Even though this is made up of 110 minutes of luminance compared to my normal 40 it doesn't begin to go as deep as I normally go in 40 minutes. I marked it for a redo but that hasn't happened so I processed this.
In praise of the Paramount ME, I'll just mention that ALL 23 frames were stacked without alignment even though taken over 3 days. The ability to return several nights later to exactly the same point without effort still amazes me, even after 6 years. Though in this case if I'd known I'd be taking so many frames I'd have dithered and thus had to align.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=11x10' RGB=4x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB024VDB024, | 
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| The variable star RY Tauri is the apparent light source of the reflection nebula vdB 27, also known as GN 04.18.8. Many wide-field images of the region are on the net but few go in for a close up like I did so miss the fine wave-like structure in the nebula. It's on the edge of the Taurus molecular cloud that's a rich source of objects like this. So much so most images are wide-field to capture several of them. Not having such a scope set up for such imaging I had to settle for just one at a time. Hipparcos puts the star and hence the nebula at about 435 light years from us. The spectral type of the star varies from F8Ve to K1Ve. This is due to its struggle to move from a protostar getting its energy from gravitational collapse to the main sequence where its energy comes from fusing hydrogen into helium. It's considered to be a T Tauri type star so at that stage of growing up to become an "adult" star.
The dark cloud above it is Barnard 214. The large faint nebula covering much of the frame centered a bit south of vdB 27 is LBN 785. Two asteroids also put in an appearance.
A close up of this nebula taken with the 8.2 meter Gemini North telescope is at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050923.html . It shows the star redder than when I imaged it. Not surprising for a star that goes from a somewhat blue F8 to a somewhat orange K1 star. They must have caught it closer to the K1 state than I did. In the Gemini image, the orange star to the lower left has nebulosity. None of that shows in my image. I went back to the FITs to hunt for it but nothing I did could bring it out. I suppose my resolution is too low so the glare from the star is hiding it. Still, that doesn't seem to be sufficient. I'm wondering if it might not be a variable nebula of some sort.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10 RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| VdB 31 is a reflection nebula around the 7th magnitude A0 star HD 31293 in Auriga about 470 light-years from earth. Some dark molecular clouds are also seen in my image. Barnard 27 is the dark nebula immediately west (left) of vdB 31. Toward its western end is the short, highly slanted trail of asteroid (62962) 2000 VA43 at magnitude 19.8. Further west going off the frame is the dark nebula Barnard 26. It is quite a bit larger than Barnard 27 but its extent is mostly off my frame. Directly above (north) vdB 31 is the dark nebula Barnard 28. It too lies partly out of frame. Between Barnard 28 and Barnard 27 is a small, mostly round dark nebula. Some sources claim it is also part of Barnard 27 making Barnard 27 a double nebula. SIMBAD, however, indicates only the southern cloud as Barnard 27. It gives the designation TGU H1887 for the double nebula with the bright region separating the two the designation of TGU H1887 P1. TGU stands for the Tokyo Gakugei University catalog. The P1 designation is for a small clump in the main cloud. The catalog list 2841 such clumps, some dark nebula have more than one and some none. The first clump would be P1 the second if present P2 etc.
I found very few images of vdB 31 on the net. All of which were very wide angle and missed much of the beautiful detail to be found in this exquisite reflection nebula.
Besides the asteroid already mentioned there are two more in the image. (140367) 2001 TP28 shines at magnitude 19.7 east of vdB 31 about 75% of the way to the left edge of my image. It too is slanting downward, just not as steeply as (62962) 2000 VA43. Easier to find, as it is on the north edge of Barnard 26 at the very top right of my image, is (13960) 1991 GF8 at magnitude 18.3.
Even with the dust, a few IR strong galaxies from the 2 Micron Sky Survey are seen in the image. Most are starlike. Apparently, only their cores are making it through the dust to my sensor. The obvious exception is 2MASX J04553838+3037595 a short distance east of vdB 31. It appears to be an edge on spiral. NED had little on it, not even a magnitude.
14" LX 200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10' (14 of 24 frames discarded due to severe weather damage), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME | 
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| Rarely seen vdB 37 is a rather red reflection nebula. It is lit by HIP 24716 a 7.74 magnitude M2 giant star. The nebula is in northern Orion. The Sky shows the star's Hipparcos parallax distance as being about 600 light years. This would then be about the distance to this nebula.
Normally reflection nebulae are blue. This is because even a red star shining through a dust cloud usually turns the nebula blue for the same reason our white sun turns the sky blue. Blue light is scattered by the dust while red and much of the green light of the star passes through with little scattering. This reddens the star, and why our sun is considered yellow when it is really white. But if the star has no blue light and is behind then the red and green scatter giving a rather pale yellow to orange color to the nebula depending on how red the star is. But if the star is in front of the nebula it lights the nebula much the same as a red bulb lights a white wall and the nebula picks up the colors of the star itself unless the dust has a color of its own. Since that tends to be neutral to sometimes slightly red the result is a red reflection nebula. A rare object but it appears vdB 37 may be one such nebula. It could be my strong red color is due to how poor my green data was but I added back green to get star colors right and that should have compensated fairly well. Still, a retake under better conditions is in order.
Three asteroids managed to sneak into the image. Not surprising as northern Orion is quite close to the Ecliptic where many of them reside. That I picked up only 3 is due to the night being very poor. Nothing new as if I waited for a good night I'd still be waiting. They just aren't happening. Several I'd normally pick up are in the frame according to the Minor Planet Center but I see them so weakly I didn't try to bring them out. The also meant much of the nebulosity in the field was lost and the bright stars had huge halos from shining through gunky skies. This caused them to have huge rings and bloat badly. I sort of dealt with these but the result is some wonky looking bright stars. Also, my green color data was hit by clouds and nearly non-existent. I had to use a lot of pseudo-green so the color is quite suspect. I retook this one several times but this first attempt was the only one with usable data. Another for the reshoot list if this miserable weather ever changes. After many months of it, I'm beginning to think it is permanent.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB037VDB037, | 
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| The illuminating star for vdB 38 is HD 34989 a B1 star about 2 degrees north-northwest of Bellatrix which marks Orion's western shoulder. Hipparcos puts the star about 726 light-years from us which then would also be the distance to the nebula. While van den Berg was interested in reflection nebula some of these also have H alpha emission. This is one of those. In fact, it is embedded in a huge cloud of ionized hydrogen. Using only short LRGB exposures I didn't pick up much of it. The entire complex is Sh2-263. Since I picked up mostly the reflection component I've listed it under the vdB 38 designation due to not using the H alpha filter.
HD 34989 is a B1V star. Normally I get rid of the reflections I get from bright stars by taking a similar star not involved in nebulosity and subtracting its reflections from those in the image. But I couldn't find any B1V stars of sufficient brightness (near enough) to work. I had to settle for a later class star that wasn't quite magnitude 5.8. The result was much blue light remained. Some of the blue in the circular area around the star is likely glare I couldn't remove by subtraction. Not knowing how much to further remove I stopped at this point.
Notice the lack of fainter stars to the upper right. This is due to the dark nebula, LDN 1588.
It didn't help that every time I tried for this object (6 nights) we had poor transparency with lots of ice in the air (The best frames of three of these nights was used to make this image) that just added to the glare and reflection issue. The narrow band of blue light near the bottom is a reflection that didn't show up at all when I took the calibration star. I doubt it is real but since there was no hint of it in the calibration star's image I left it in. I suspect it is due to reflections enhanced by all the ice crystals in the air.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB038VDB038, | 
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