A deep 25-hour narrowband view of NGC 7380 (The Wizard Nebula) in Cepheus, captured from my Whispering Skies Observatory in upstate New York.

This SHO–RGB integration revisits the Wizard with a focus on subtle, faint structures — the sculpted gas towers and diffuse hydrogen glow surrounding the main cluster. The data were captured under Bortle 5 skies using the William Optics 132mm FLT with Flattener/0.8X reducer at f/5.5, an ASI2600MM-Pro camera, and an IOptron CEM 60 mount.

Given our local weather patterns, it’s remarkable that I achieved this level of integration. To date, this is my longest yet!

The nice part of this capture was working from my new observatory. I took advantage of these wonderfully long fall nights to keep my four scopes running as much as I could! During 5 nights in this last Lunar Cycle, I was able to collect data on eight different objects! I now have it set up so that I only need to spend 10 minutes at the start of the night to open the roof and remove lens caps. And another 10 minutes in the morning to close and secure the roof and replace lens caps. Most of the remaining time, I sleep on the sofa in my Astro Man Cave - where I do my remote control from!

Newer equipment, longer integration times, and current processing tools have led to an image that reveals more microstructure in the nebula than was seen in my earlier 2021 rendition.

🔗 A full project write-up — including capture timeline, annotated overlays, and comparative crops — is on my website: CosgrovesCosmos.com:

https://cosgrovescosmos.com/projects/ngc7380-wizard-2025

Thanks for looking!

Clear Skies,

Pat