From deep sea to deep sky! It‘s really a zoo up there!

A dark molecular cloud in constellation Cepheus, about 650 light years away. Parts of it are illuminated by blue stars – so it is partly a reflection nebula as well (swipe to see them a bit better).

Pretty difficult and for a Bortle 4-5 region just what I could do. Would need another crystal clear night on it.
Unfortunately I decided to use a broadband filter to reduce light pollution at least a bit. However what I got instead were halos around the brightest blue stars. I did not try to reduce them, did not process stars and nebula separately and so star colors are not 100% „real“. Just de-emphasized the stars a bit using AstroSwell‘s script.

Borg 90FL
1.08 Flattener
F=540mm
ASI2600MC Pro
IDAS NGS1 Filter
57x300sec (4h45m)

PixInsight
Topaz Denoise AI