The reflection nebula vdB 135 is unusual being orange in color rather than blue like most reflection nebulae are. It is located in Cygnus a bit northwest of the Veil Nebula complex. It is lit by SAO 70265 an M1 IIIe red giant star. When the star is in front of the nebula so it reflects the light of the star then it will take on the color of the illuminating star. If the illuminating star is behind the nebula so it is lit by light passing through it that tends to favor shorter wavelengths giving the nebula a blue color or at least making the light a lot bluer than the illuminating star. SAO 70265 is listed at 8.44 magnitude and 725 light-years distant. While that has a lot of uncertainty it is the best distance estimate we have for the star and nebula.
Due to heavy smoke here from fires raging in Washington, Oregon and Montana I had reduced my to-do list to only bright objects. Unfortunately, vdB objects are cataloged by their illuminating stars which tend to be bright even if the nebula is faint. My system thus saw this one as "bright" and took it. Thanks to the loss of a couple magnitudes to the smoke much of the faint outer nebulosity was lost though I did pick up the main part. This one needs a complete reshoot next summer assuming no more smoke to deal with. During the collection of the color data, the smoke got so thick one green frame was unusable the one used was of poor quality so some pseudo green has been added to compensate. I hope that didn't alter the color significantly. Things got so bad the system shut down the first night it tried the smoke got so thick. None of that night's data was usable, unfortunately. It had far too weak of a signal and would have degraded the image had I used even the best of it.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RB=2x10' G=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB135VDB135, | 
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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 | 
VDB136L8X10RGB4X10R.JPG
| VdB 140 is a rather featureless reflection nebula illuminated by the star SAO 33288 with a parallax that puts it some 2500 light-years away. It is located in southern Cepheus. It is classed as a B2IIIe star, a giant blue star with emission lines. It is slightly variable between magnitude 6.45 and 6.51. It is also a double star with a separation of about 4" of arc. The companion is magnitude 12.0 so lost in the glare. There's a third member about 69" of arc away at magnitude 12.6. It's the blue star nearly directly west of SA0 33288. Whether it is a true companion or just line of sight I don't know.
I've been imaging a few of the small vdB objects at much higher resolution than they are normally seen. The result has usually been a lot more detail than is seen in the low-resolution images. Not this time. It just doesn't have any fine detail it would seem. This was taken on a somewhat better night than others that preceded it. Still, it was far from a "good" night so color is a bit noisier than I'd like. Due to the lack of detail, I doubt I'll be revisiting it.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB140VDB140, | 
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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 143 is a reflection nebula in a very dust region of Cepheus. My short exposure time didn't pick up much of the dust well enough to display it so I processed much of it out other than the far brighter reflection nebula. The Sky puts its central star, HD 206135 at almost 3900 light-years distant. If so the reflection nebula is 12 light-years across. The illuminating star is an 8th magnitude variable B3V, blue giant, star. To the northwest is HD 205938, at the much closer distance of just over 600 light-years this A class star shines at magnitude 6.5 which gave me fits in processing the image. It scattered light everywhere. There is some brighter background nebula around it in my image. Some, the faintly blue part, is likely real but the rest was of equal brightness in my color filters when G2V balanced. Thus it may be just glare. It had a huge glare circle due to reflection off the corrector plate of the SCT that covered a large part of that side of the image.
I was surprised to find a number of faint galaxies coming through all the dust. A few are listed in the 2MASS survey and thus in NED but none had even magnitude data let alone redshift information so I didn't bother to annotate the image.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB143VDB143, | 
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| VdB 144 is a very faint reflection nebula around an orange K0III star. Usually, these are found around blue giant stars, not orange giant ones though it is so bright in my image it looks rather white due to a monitor's limited response. The nebula is about 700 light years distant in the northeastern part of Cygnus the Swan. At least that is the distance The Sky gives for its illuminating star HD 206509 (44453700 AU). Since the nebula is very blue the star has to be behind it otherwise it would pick up a lot of the color of the star and that seems totally missing. Due to the spectral difference, I was able to rather reduce the star without harming the nebula, something that's almost impossible when it is lit by a blue giant.
When I went to process this image I found the luminance frames all unusable as some idiot left the lights on in the observatory! I was going to retake them but see that never happened. Fortunately, the color was taken the following night and I had apparently shut off the lights as they all were fine. So I made a pseudo luminance frame from the 6 color frames. This is why I normally don't bin color differently than the lights. It saves your backside sometimes! This meant I didn't go as deep as I would have liked but the result is pretty good. I tried to compare this to other images on the net but other than POSS images Google didn't turn any up.
14" LX200R @ f/10, Pseudo L=6x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB144VDB144, | 
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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
| vdB 148 is a reflection nebula around the 8.5 magnitude F2 star HD 239856 which The Sky puts at 338,139,600au or a bit less than 5400 light-years from us. It is located in southern Cepheus.
In his catalog, van den Berg lists the surface brightness as very bright, bright, moderate, faint and very faint. #148 is listed as faint. It is listed as type II which means the illuminating star is outside the nebula. His color scale ranges from very blue to blue to moderately blue, to intermediate to moderately red then red and finally very red. vdB 148 rates the blue designation. Next, he rates the absorption around the nebula based on star density. That ranges from strong to moderate to weak to absent. He rates vdB 148 as moderate. In Tom Davis' images, there's an obvious color change surrounding vdB 148 in his image that would indicate absorption. It clearly shows what van den Berg considered moderate absorption I did see a faint reddening of my background I was going to balance out until I looked at Tom's image. I left it in. It's so weak I doubt you'll notice it, however. Unfortunately, his site has gone dark.
The PDF of the van den Berg paper announcing his list of 158 is at http://cdsbib.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/cdsbib?1966AJ.....71..990V . Click on the link to ADS services then the link to the PDF file.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB148VDB148, | 
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| VdB 149 is a small part of a much larger dust cloud illuminated by the star BD+72 1018. According to The Sky's database, it is about 1000 light-years from earth. On the other side of the cloud is another star illuminating the cloud which creates vdB 150. I'm posting this one out of order so the two are seen back to back since they are related. The illuminating star of vdB 150 is an 8th magnitude B8IV star while the illuminating star for vdB 149 is a B8V star. The difference is the former is a giant blue star while the illuminating star for vdB 149 is a main sequence blue star and thus about 2 magnitudes fainter since they are at virtually the same distance.
Conditions were again very poor, especially for the color data. Again I threw out a lot of frames to get a few sort of usable ones. Most years 10 quick frames and I'm done. Most of 2012 was try for several nights, throw out 2/3rds (about 19 in this case) and hope what's left works. Due to lousy transparency for the color files, much of the fainter nebulosity has no or little color.
For some reason, vdB 149 reminds me of a small chainsaw, the handle formed by the hole on the right side and the top of the bar the blue streak running east. The bottom of the bar is missing. I've probably spent far too many hours using a chainsaw cutting my way out of the woods to the township road after storms all these years. So far that's not been necessary this year. Did I just jinx myself? I'm likely the only one to see that in the object.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RG=2x10' B=3x10' (all blue really poor), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB149VDB149, | 
VDB149L4X10RGB2X10.JPG
| VdB 150, along with vdB 149 are reflection nebulae in central Cepheus that are part of a single huge molecular cloud lit by bright blue stars. VdB 150 is illuminated by 8th magnitude SAO 10264, a B8IV star. The Sky puts its distance at about 1000 light-years based on parallax. This is pushing the limit of the method so consider it quite approximate as the parallax is only about 0.003" which is a very difficult measurement, even for Hipparcos to make.
As has been usual for 2012 weather took a toll on the image, especially the color data. It was so damaged by clouds I didn't try to bring out the background nebulosity of the molecular cloud as the color data was just too noisy. Also at my image scale, it is rather featureless. But the data was sufficient for the reflection nebula.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' (many poor) RGB=2x10' (all poor), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME Related Designations for VDB150VDB150, | 
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