Dear reader, I am happy to share this image and the story behind it with you

This is my first image to process after a 2 months break from astrophotography due to bad weather. On 20th December I saw a much awaited forecast for clear weather and started to make plans for the night. I considered several options for imaging - whether to complete my Spaghetti Nebula mosaic which I started in the beginning of November or to choose a broadband target because of the New Moon. The broadband targets that I considered were all in Orion - M78 or LDN1622 - the Boogieman Nebula. I also started Stellarium and explored the area. And there I saw this very interesting and colorful region of space which looked very interesting and beautiful. A quick search showed that the region is named "Angel Nebula" - WOW!

So the choice became simple - whether to image the Angel or the Spaghetti. A hard call for me. So I decided to flip a coin and decide And thanks to the coin I now can share with you how I saw this very beautiful area of the sky.

The Angel Nebula and the area around it includes several NGC objects among which are NGC 2170, 2167, 2182, 2183 and 2185. It is so beautiful because it includes a mix of dark, reflection and emission nebula. And one can find all kind of colors in those nebulae - from blue to pink, orange, red and purple. The region is worth looking without stars as well because only in this way one can perceive the cloud formations and dynamics in the area.

Despite the objects being faint - another thing presented a challenge for processing of the image. In fact it is not a thing but many things called geosynchronous satellites above Europe. For my location the Angel Nebula is situated right behind the highway of those satellites. I don't have a single frame without them... And on top of that - they pass right through the middle. Considering this up to now I was unable to fully remove the trails from my image. I will keep trying and will reprocess if I succeed. In fact lowering the Sigma High value when integrating to 1.5 does the trick but some of the brightness of the nebulae goes away together with the trails so for now I decided to process what I have.

NGC 2170 and the Angel Nebula are situated in the constellation Monoceros some 2 400 light years from us. The size of the nebula is estimated to be 60 light years across. For my location this object rises to about 41 degrees in the night sky thus giving me about 6 hours per night of imaging time.

CS,
Ivan