Barnard 150

Among the more mysterious deep-sky objects are dark nebulae – clouds of interstellar dust that do not emit light themselves, but absorb the light from background stars. Hidden the denser regions of these dust clouds new stars are formed, new stars from the ashes of previous generations. Observing them requires dark skies, so they are ideal targets for the TURMX observatory.

This particular cloud is Barnard 150 in the constellation Cepheus, sometimes also called Seahorse Nebula.

This image is an LRGB composite with realistic star colors using a total of 11 hours of exposure time. Most of the time went into the luminance channel to reduce noise and chisel out the dark nebulosity.