Piercing - NGC 7023 - The Iris Nebula. Thirteen hundred light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, a young blue-white star burns inside a cloud of interstellar dust. The dust has no light of its own. What you see here is starlight scattered back toward us off grains of carbon and silicate — the same physics that makes Earth's sky blue, playing out across six light-years of space. The star is HD 200775. The petals of dust it illuminates gave the nebula its name. Beyond the bright center the frame darkens into something harder to see: the molecular cloud the Iris is embedded in, and past that the faint dust drifting through this entire region of sky, lit by nothing brighter than the combined glow of the galaxy itself. It is among the dimmest structure that can be recorded from the ground. What you are witnessing here is the galactic moments after the birth of a star, when its light pierces through the dust that created it to reach us. Equipment: Apertura CarbonStar 200, 800mm, f/4 ZWO 2600MM Air Total integration time is 22h 33m.
