Photo of the Week for December 13, 2013

In 1965, astronomer Beverly Lynds compiled a list of nebulas, which included this odd-looking dust cloud, #552. The small yellow knot of nebulosity in the dust cloud in the upper middle of the image is known as Cohen 129. Using two different cameras and telescopes, Keith Egger of Prince George, British Columbia collected 25 hours of image data from April until the beginning of November to create this image of the faint nebula. For luminance, he used an Atik 383L+ monochrome CCD camera mounted to a Sky-Watcher 190mm Maksutov-Newtonian telescope operating at f/5.3. Colour was added using a filter-modified Canon XSi DSLR shooting through a Stellarvue SVR90T f/7 refractor. Luminance data was 118 × 10 minutes, and colour was 36 × 10 minutes.