M78 - Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula

M78 is a reflection nebula in Orion.
Its brightness in contrast to the surrounding dark dust clouds make it very captivating.
This version is a close up taken using a Planewave CDK24 telescope.
This image was created from two square panels and then cropped to the final display ratio.
It has been imaged in RGB.18 frames per colour channel per panel, each 600s.

I can imagine three ghost faces in this shot - one in the lower bright nebula (NGC2071) with head tilted to the left with a smiling mouth and bulbous nose accented in brown, another not so clear in the bright section of the central nebula (NGC2068) - the image needs to be rotated clockwise 90 degrees to imagine it and a light grey face with an open mouth on the left edge of NGC2068 looking up to the right. Not sure if any of these is the 'actual' Casper, but if the brightness is reduced the second one becomes the clearer candidate.


The raw data contains a number of subs with difficult to eliminate satellite trails, a spot on the green channel and also dead pixels which have not been remove with the pre=applied callibration files. Instead these were removed using Photoshop.