The Pacman Nebula (NGC281), named after its resemblance to the video game character, is located in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia. It is estimated to be about 9200 light years away with a radius of approximately 48 lightyears.

This image was made with a Nikon Z7II and a Nikon 500mm f/5.6 PF lens. A total of 62 30-second images were taken at ISO3200 for a total exposure time of 31 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 sigma clipped averaging on program astro-sca. The stacked image was then stretched and color corrected using astro-color-stretch. Final processing was done with Capture One and Topaz DeNoise AI. Both astro-sca and astro-color-stretch are Python programs available here in the astrophotography software downloads page