Photo of the Week for December 7, 2018

Have you seen a photo of this faint patch of nebulosity before? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Certainly if the submissions we receive at SkyNews are any indication, this isn’t one of the more frequently imaged objects. The Lion Nebula (and it really does look like a lion in profile) is catalogued as Sharpless 2-132 and located in the constellation Cepheus. Perhaps one reason it’s not photographed more often is because it’s situated just five degrees east of the IC1396 nebula complex—a very popular imaging target.

This Lion Nebula portrait was captured last October by Stephan Hamel, in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He combined a total of ten hours of narrow-band exposure data (divided equally between H-alpha and OIII filters) captured with an Explore Scientific 102mm refractor telescope and a ZWO ASI 1600MM cooled CMOS camera.