"A Cepheus Colaboration".

This is a first for our TSS APOD!

I don't ever remember having selected a 'Colaboration' between 2 or more people for an image.

However this one is worth noting.

Member Jockinireland (David) has produced the following image from data aquired from Scott Denning in Colorado.

The following is the comments posted by Scott on Astrobin:

This image is my first collaboration with another imager. David Mackie lives near Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. A few weeks ago he posted a spectacular wide-field image of dust in the constellation Cepheus. He wrote that he had intended to collect more data to the north and south of his widefield image and create a mosaic, but that Galway was socked in with bad weather and he had to stop. So I wrote to him and offered to collect the extra data.

It's just SO wonderful in this day and age that somebody can reach out across the light years to capture such a cosmic dustscape. It’s no less wonderful that a guy on the stormy coast of Ireland and a guy in the high dry prairies of Colorado can collaborate to put together a multi-panel mosaic of this stuff over the internet in a matter of days. David did all the postprocessing on this resulting mosaic, and I’m just overjoyed with how it came out!

This image spans more than 14 degrees of sky north to south and 10 degrees from east to west. Its more than 25 times as “tall” as the full Moon is across. It includes a bunch of favorite dust features: the Iris Nebula, Wolf’s Cave, the Dark Shark, the Rotting Fish, the Fighting Dragons, and many many more. Who knew the northern sky was so colorful and phantasmagoric!

Cepheus, Polaris, and Taurus are fantastic regions of the night sky for imaging because so much of the dust is back-lit rather than silhouetted. The dust in this region is “above” most of the galactic disk, so the light in this colorful image is the reflection of billions of stars “here below.” With the exception of locally bright reflection nebulae like the Iris, the source of illumination is the integrated light of stars in the “underlying" galactic disk rather than specific stars. This is just a wonderful perspective on galactic geography (“galactography?”)

These dark clouds are 600 to 1000 light years away, so we see them in the late Middle Ages. At that distance, a big dust cloud like the Dark Shark is 40 or 50 light years long. To give you some perspective, that’s more than 10 times the distance to our nearest star! The gigantic spectacle of dust clouds in this image is more than 200 light years across. Both David and I imaged with ASI2600 mc pro cameras on Samyang 135 mm camera lenses (no telescopes!) at f2/8. The final mosaic is about 12 hours per panel for a total exposure time of just under 36 hours. Data were collected between October 12 and October 20, 2023 in Colorado and Ireland.

Congratulations to both David and Scott for teaming up to give us this great image!

Here's a link to David's post: LINK