IC348

 IC 348 (also known as IC 1985) is a rarely imaged open star cluster surrounded by a reflection nebula. The reason this object is not imaged is due to the very bright star glare washing most of the detail away. I spent countless hours slowly expanding this image to fight of the glare and reveal the wonderful image you see here. The light from the roughly 400 stars in the cluster is scattered by  clouds of dust in the star-forming region, producing the reflection  nebula.

Location/Date: Taken at Stellar Winds Observatory, a/k/a Stan Watson Observatory in Animas, NM from Oct 4th  through Oct 29th, 2018

Equipment used:  PlaneWave 17" f6.7 on a  PlaneWave HD200 mount and SBIG 16803 imaging camera.

Exposure times:  Luminance 320 minutes, red - 220 minutes, green - 220minutes, blue - 220 minutes, HA - 300 minutes.  All  second sub- exposures at bin 1x1

Processing:   All data was calibrated, aligned, combined in CCD stack. All other processing done using CC Photoshop and PixInsight.

Labeled Version by Sakib Rasool

Nice animation by Tim Morrill