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The Wizard Nebula
A small red cloud around a cluster of newborn stars, said to look like a wizard in a pointed hat.
Seeing it from the UK and Ireland
It sits in Cepheus, which never sets from the UK and Ireland, and on autumn evenings it passes almost straight overhead. Your eyes will not show it, and neither will most telescopes, because the glow is too faint and spread out. It is a camera object. It is also small, a little under the width of the full Moon, which is why it sits in the middle of this picture with so much sky around it. This picture was taken from a town garden, through a filter that lets through the red of hydrogen and blocks most of the street lighting.
The red is hydrogen, the same glow as the Heart and the Pacman on these pages. A cluster of young stars sits inside the cloud, and the ultraviolet light from the hottest of them makes the gas around them shine in one particular red.
The cluster came first in the books. Caroline Herschel found it in 1787, and it is catalogued as NGC 7380. The cloud around it was only picked up later, once cameras could record a glow too faint for the eye. The stars are a few million years old, which is very young, and the cloud is still making more.
Most of the work is done by a pair of very heavy, very hot stars near the middle called DH Cephei. They circle each other closely, and their light and their winds are pushing the gas outwards and carving the shapes you can see. The dark lanes across the cloud are dust in front of the glow, blocking it.
The name comes from the shape in long exposures, which some people see as a figure in a robe and a pointed hat. It takes a deeper picture than this one to see the whole figure, so do not worry if you cannot find him here.
The numbers
- Also called
- NGC 7380, and Sharpless 142
- Constellation
- Cepheus
- Distance
- About 8,000 light years
- Size in the sky
- About 25 arcminutes, a little under a full Moon
- Size of the whole region
- About 100 light years across
- What it is
- A hydrogen cloud lit by the young stars inside it
- The cluster found by
- Caroline Herschel, in 1787
- The stars lighting it
- DH Cephei, a close pair of very hot stars
- Visible to the eye
- No, it is a photographic target
- Best months from the UK and Ireland
- August to December
To find out whether it is up tonight, and when it gets properly dark where you are, see Sky Tonight.