M78 Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula embedded within Ghostly Ha (Franklin Marek)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: LBN 938 · LBN 939 · M 78 · NGC 2064 · NGC 2067 · NGC 2068 · NGC 2071 · VdB59 · VdB60

M78 Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula embedded within Ghostly Ha

Often overlooked this time of year with the big focus on objects like the horsehead or orion nebula, just off the side of Orion is the Casper the Friendly Ghost nebula M78. A very bright pair of reflection nebulae with dark secrets hidden behind dust lanes. Curious about that I took a decent amount of dedicated Ha data and continuum subtracted it from the red channel. The amount of Ha filling and swirling around the whole image was breathtaking! Also in Ha hidden structures in the dark dust lanes peaked through revealing dozens of Herbig-Haro and Young Stellar Objects! I made two seperate collages showcasing them.

I absolutely struggled on how to merge the Ha with the RGB. There was just sooo much Ha swirling and filling the image it was a balancing act to not wash out the beautiful RGB. In the end I decided to showcase the RGB as the main image with the HaRGB as the mouseover. Please let me know in the comments if you prefer either HaRGB over the standard RGB image and I will gladly swap them.

Below are some close in crops, dedicated images, and collages. Enjoy exploring the image!

Video on this image: https://youtu.be/hr9gZbJMT4c
Interactive slider on my website: https://www.setiastro.com/nebula#casper

Ha continuum subtract image

Herbig-Haro Objects

Young Stellar Objects

Close ups of some key areas

Final
Original
B
C
D

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	8HYBBYN6W5SISZP87ALPSQQHKFMIHIN5
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h46m44s.143
RA (top/left)	05h48m18s.780
RA (top/right)	05h48m15s.348
RA (bottom/right)	05h45m29s.859
RA (bottom/left)	05h45m21s.908

Dec (center)	+00°00′17″.34
Dec (top/left)	-00°29′14″.93
Dec (top/right)	+00°35′12″.12
Dec (bottom/right)	+00°22′43″.54
Dec (bottom/left)	-00°31′13″.47

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M78 Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula embedded within Ghostly Ha

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M78 Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula embedded within Ghostly Ha

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