Dark Shark Nebula (middle portion of the image) and the Rotten Fish Nebula (top of the image) are what these shapes of interstellar dust are called. Someone with vivid imagination…
The Dark Shark Nebula is part of a large molecular cloud in the constellation Cepheus. Within the Nebula there are two blue reflection nebulae, vdB 149 (below the shark’s head) and vdB 150 (above the shark’s head), reflecting the light of stars within the nebula. The shark’s nose is the dark nebula LDN 1235, nose to tail spanning approximately 15 lightyears.
Single Luminance exposure
The Dark Shark Nebula is very dim. Above is the result from a 5 minute single exposure with the luminance filter, and I think you can agree there is really nothing to see but stars. This presented me with a problem how to make sure that I framed the Nebula correctly. To do this I had to learn star-pattern from my exposure and compare it with images of this Nebula published on the Internet. Luckily, the resulting framing came out as intended.
To get this result I had to spend 14 hours of exposures with L, R, G and B filters. Here I used the RedCat 51 telescope with ZWO 2600 MM Pro camera.