The Bear Claw Nebula

HDW-2 - The Bear Claw Nebula - Planetary Nebula in Cassiopeia

PlaneWave CDK-20 20" f/7.7 Astrograph

PlaneWave L-500 Mount

QHY600M CMOS Camera

Total exposure: HaOiiiLRGB 16.8 hours

Sierra Remote Observatories

August 2022

Data acquisition by Eric Coles

Image processing by Bob Fera

The Bear Claw is a large, faint planetary nebula that's officially, and poetically, known as Hartl-Dengl-Weinberger 2. (It's also known as Sh2-200, from the Sharpless catalog of emission nebulae.) Discovered in 1983, it wasn't determined to be a planetary nebula until 2017. This image is a composite taken through narrowband Hydrogen-Alpha (red) and Oxygen-III (teal) filters along with standard broadband RGB filters for the stars. The nebula is extremely faint, especially in H-alpha, and took lots of post-processing to bring out. As I normally do, I processed the narrowband data to approximate "true" color as best as I could.

Copyright: Bob Fera