I am surprised at how nicely this turned out. The night followed an evening rain. Lots of ground humidity and dew. As the moisture rose with the darkness, the sky was obscured with intermitant thin clouds. This is a live stack. So I monitored the complete run, skipping frames in real time as necessary. The Triad Ultra plays a big role in the image's clarity, as it ignores most visible wavelengths and favors the high bands...which cut through the haze.

We hear he is a whiz of a wiz
If ever a wiz there was
If ever, oh ever a wiz there was

Here's a closeup of the Wizard Nebula (NZGC7380). It earned the moniker from the apparent profile of a person wearing a pointy hat, wand under arm, and both hands reaching forward. Do you see it, too?

NGC 7380 is over 8 thousand light years from our Sun, in the Perseus Spiral Arm of the Milky Way. It can be found in the northern constellation Cepheus. It's perhaps 20 light years across...which is modest on the nebulonic scale.

The nebula is dim and a telescope is needed to see it. The whole related area is large in our sky...about 5 times the size of the full moon. I shot just a portion, an area about a third the size of our moon.

The first lasting record of the nebula's discovery was made back in 1787, by Caroline Herschel. The astronomer in the family was William, but he had a habit of unloading work onto his sister. She'd find stuff, he'd get the credit. Hmmm, sound familiar?

Wizard was formed relatively recently, at least in cosmic terms, perhaps 6 million years ago. It's still early in its expansion, so features are crisp.

You can see the epicenter of the original supernova just off the wiz' left hand...a small cluster of slightly blue, bright stars, one especially large. Their radiation and solar wind is mostly lighting up the entire nebula. These are new stars ignited from the originjal star's ejected material almost immediately after it aged out, collapsed on itself, and exploded. Many of the stars elsewhere in this image were formed from the expanding detritus. A wider view would show thousands more.

Dark, nonglowing stuff is giving the nebula its distinctive features. These clouds can include heavier elements like helium, carbon, nitrogen, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and even iron. I suspect that small compact cloud that looks like a booger on your screen is made up of this stuff. But the other clouds are mostly smoke—ash, dust, and gasses like carbon monoxide. The glowing colors of red and orange is ionized hydrogen, made to glow by the intense radiation from the central blue cluster.

As was once said, "Wizards had always known that the act of observation changed the thing that was observed, and sometimes they forgot that it also changed the observer too."

Tonight's music for wannabe astronomers comes from Jessica Williams, with her jazz arrangement of Spoken Softly.