Witch Head Nebula
The Witch head nebula (IC 2118) is aptly named due to its shape. It is a very faint nebula in the Constellation Orion and likely the remnants of an ancient super nova or a gas cloud illuminated by nearby the nearby star Rigel. Its distance is some 900 light years away.
This image was made with a Nikon Z7II and a Nikon 600mm f/4 lens. A total of 59 30-second images were taken at ISO 3200 for a total exposure time of 29.5 minutes. Star tracking was done with a Fornax LighTack II. The raw images were converted to TIF using RawTherapee, which were then aligned using Deep Sky Stacker. The star aligned images were then stacked using a simple average followed by image stretching and color correction using astro-color-stretch. Program astro-color-stretch is a Python program and is available for free here in the astrophotography software downloads page.
