One of the most fascinating things about amateur astrophotography to me is that
we can still discover things out there that don't have a name yet because no one on earth
has noticed them before. And even though I've understood this on some level for years it's
always somehow seemed unlikely that I'd personally ever just stumble upon something brand new,
until I did just that. So here is a photo of my discovery, which is a reflection nebula in
the constellation Cepheus that I've named the Hummingbird Nebula or Carver One and I'll get
into naming later in the video. What I'm going to do in this video in general is
tell you about the story of this discovery but also make it educational so if you're interested
in finding new deep sky objects out there yourself I'll show you some tools that will
make that easier both to find candidate objects to try photographing and how to
research if something unusual you found truly is a discovery. And that part of the process:
confirmation that you've really made a discovery is actually pretty tricky there's gonna be some
serious time researching whether it's really a discovery and then what exactly it is that
you found is it a galaxy a reflection nebula a supernova remnant a planetary nebula with dim
smudgy objects that actually can be harder than you think to tell what it actually is but there
are some clear signs that can indicate what it is usually based on the star at the center or nearby.
The story of my discovery goes back to 2019 I was looking to create a unique image with a technique
called Mosaic Imaging where you extend your field of view by making an image in panels and then you
connect them back together in processing for daytime photography we commonly call
this technique a panorama but for some reason an astrophotography we call it a mosaic but it's the
exact same thing and I picked the cave nebula for this Mosaic because I've mostly seen close-ups of
the cave and I thought it would be cool to get a more panoramic view a more detailed but wide view
of the area around the cave and I could see from survey data there's a lot of sort of interesting
structures there in dark nebulae structures so I spent most of my Imaging hours in the summer
and fall of 2019 on this project and one of the neat things I found while working on it
was this collection of dark nebulae that we're already known that sort of joined up to create
this feature I dubbed the skeleton hand nebula and when I published this photo on Astro bin I
hadn't spent a huge amount of time processing it was sort of just I just want to put this
out there it looks cool and so now fast forward to February 2023 and something I do with uh the group
on my patreon is we organize a monthly Imaging Challenge on the nebula photos Discord and in
February we picked dark nebulae as the challenge and I always put up one of my older images as sort
of an inspiration and an example for each monthly challenge submission and so I put up this skeleton
hand nebula image that again is taken in 2019 but looking at again in 2023 I remembered oh I always
meant to reprocess that more carefully so I went to my collection of external hard drives I found
2019 I found the data I'm a total digital pack rat so I keep everything and I found the original
stacked data files and this is what it looked like with just a screen stretch but these days what I
often do in processing is I'll while the data is still linear I'll run starnet or Star exterminator
which removes the Stars I did that this time and this little blue splotch just jumped out
out at me it was just right in the center sort of the field and I was like what is that I've
never noticed that before so I pulled up all the different filters that I used and it wasn't there
in the O3 data it wasn't there in that shape in the ha data or the red it was only strong in
the luminance the blue and then faintly in the green and so I thought that sort of indicates
it's probably a reflection nebula if it was a planetary you'd probably see it stronger in the
narrow band channels than the Broadband channels so at this point I looked through the Vandenberg
catalog which is probably many of you know the main catalog for reflection nebulae at least in
the Northern Hemisphere and it wasn't there so now I get a bit more serious with my research I own
astrobin premium subscription so all my images are Advanced plate solved with pixinsight so
that's just usually what I do to find coordinates I just go back to the image and I can hover the
cursor over wherever I want and it tells me the coordinates so I hover the cursor over where
this reflection nebula is and it gives me the coordinates in right Ascension and declination in
this box right here I noted these coordinates down and I head over to this portal this is the poor
portal for all the databases that are part of CDs which again is this astronomical data
center in Strasbourg France and it's a resource used by astronomers all over the world one way
that it's used is if you're studying a specific object usually a star you can just type in the
name of that star and find all the papers that have already been written about it but another
thing we can do with this tool is sort of like a reverse search instead of knowing the object
name I can just type in the coordinates in right Ascension and declination and then it's going to
find all known objects in that area of the sky and list them down here where it says tabular data
and this first tab is simbad which is the the main database for all the objects in the night
sky including Stars nebulae galaxies everything this First Column is telling you how close the
object is to the coordinates that you put in so you can see in this case there's only one object
within an arc minute of the coordinates that I inputted and so let's click on it and this looks
very promising it looks to be a very well-known star there are a few Clues this star is well
studied one is that there's lots of information about its type and color and that's actually the
right type it's a b type star meaning it's a blue star which would give a blue reflection
nebula and then it has many cross references there are 29 different identifiers for this star
and then most importantly there are many references there are 63 research papers that
refer to this star in some way in their study um but again there's all of this about the star but
there's no reflection nebula listed in Sinbad so it's possible that this is a star that's lighting
up the dust to create the reflection nebula so my next step is to determine is there an error
in my photo I you know is this really a nebula or is it just maybe something wrong with my data
if it's real it should show up in some of the professional survey data so for this we're going
to use another CDs project called Aladdin which is their interface for looking at survey data
and I'm just going to use Aladdin light here which is the web version and it's perfectly
sufficient for my needs there are some nice added features in the desktop version but I don't need
those here all I need to do here is just paste in our coordinates in the upper left search box
right here and then I'm going to change the stretch on the survey data so that we can see
the dim stuff a little bit better I'm going to change it from linear right here to square root
and there we go to me this was all I needed really to know that I'm on the right track it looks like
a reflection nebula it's obviously showing up stronger in blue than in red and the shape
matches exactly what I've captured and now you might be wondering so you didn't really discover
it is right there in the survey data how is it possible that no one has spotted this if it's
in the digitized sky survey that's been around for decades well the truth is there are still
tons of undiscovered deep Sky objects that will show up in the sky surveys if you know exactly
where to look but it's like finding a needle in a haystack there's so many stars out there and this
is just this little tiny reflection nebula around one of them so there are amateur astronomers who
love doing this scanning the digital Sky surveys looking for these unknown uncataloged objects
if that sounds of interest to you it would be a great way to start making discoveries
now I have a more complete video on this topic on my patreon but I'll just say one more thing
about it if you do find something interesting in the DSS2 data the digitized sky survey it
could be just what's called a plate fault these images are digitized glass plates and once in a
while there was a problem that made it into the scan and some of these problems like pieces of
dust or hair or something like that can look like unusual deep Sky objects when they're really just
a scanning mistake or an issue with the original glass plate so I always either confirm with your
own images of the night sky or look at one of the other visible light surveys like pan stars or sdss
and it should be there too assuming we're talking visual band now some of these surveys are infrared
and other wavelengths of Light which can be very interesting and tell us more about an object but
I'm not going to go into all that here if you're interested in all this join my patreon and we can
talk a lot more about it all right so we've now confirmed we have a potential reflection nebula
on our hands what's the next step well what I did next was I went through this entire list of
identifiers here for this star and I added the word nebula and I did a Google search again to
Google Images search and an astro event search for each of these combinations of terms and eventually
I got to searching v374 sep nebula and this search actually returned a promising result on Google it
was a press release from Spitzer Space Telescope which is an infrared telescope a predecessor to
the jwst and they produced this beautiful image of the region that I had originally photographed in
my 2019 Mosaic but captured it in infrared light and the star that I'm interested in v374 step is
specifically mentioned in the press release and in the picture as well and it's one that astronomers
are interested in because it's thought to have this circumstellar disk of Dusty material around
it that is creating this cool hourglass shaped shadow in the infrared image so this is super neat
um but if I compare this red shape in the infrared image it doesn't really line up with my blue
reflection nebula and so that's to be expected did infrared light is going to show you different
things than visible light but in keeping my with my research on this lead I decided okay someone
has to have imaged an invisible light right now this is a well-researched star so I keep going and
going eventually I find an article written in 2002 that is a merged catalog of 913 reflection nebulae
in our Milky Way galaxy and then it has a really nice discussion of reflection nebulae in general
and I was especially drawn to the final paragraph where the author says actually for a significant
number of the objects included nothing is known except for their coordinates meanwhile many of
them coincide with infrared sources and that's the latest publication listing reflection nebulae that
I could find 2002 and my nebula wasn't listed but this was still a good resource to look
through and read the actual paper it was really interesting both how little is known about many
reflection nebulae and that they often coincide with interesting structures in infrared light but
that take on a different shape um are often called morphology in the professional literature I'd
love to read more about this if anyone has some suggestions for articles also in this extended
research I went through all of the abstracts that mention the star v374 sep on EDS which is another
great service for astronomers and on ads you can search and read through the abstracts for
all kinds of astronomical research and then they often link out to the archive which is the main
preprint server for astronomy and again there you can read the full papers often before they've been
published but they've published a pre-print in any case none of the paper is about the star that
I could find mention a reflection nebula or any kind of visible light Imaging so at this point all
signs are pointing to a discovery so what do I do well if this had been a potential planetary nebula
I could go to planetary nebulae.net and submit it and maybe get a response from Pascal Ledoux and
uh that's really cool that there's a pathway to getting your planetary nebula Discovery registered
on an official site but in this case there was no hint of it in O3 the central star is a b type main
sequence star not a white dwarf so we can rule out planetary nebula there is no similar effort
to catalog unknown reflection nebulae that I know about if anyone knows differently please let me
know because I'd love to submit this somewhere I did ask Marcel Dressler about how to go about
registering a discovery of a reflection nebula and he suggested just announce it on astrobin so
that is what I did on July 6th and I also added an addendum of all the various names for this
star in my description so if anyone else comes across you know this nebula they look it up on
CDs like I did and then they do a Google search of the star it should now pop up if they search
for that star name plus nebula so it's just I'm just sort of going back through how I researched
it and if anyone else finds this hopefully they can then find my announcement on astrobin
I start started collecting new data for this in March from home and unfortunately this spring
and early summer was just terrible weather-wise it's raining right now actually and when it wasn't
the Cloudy weather or rain it was Wildfire smoke from the Canadian wildfires so I made very little
progress in several months on capturing new data and I didn't even particularly like what I saw so
I sort of came to the conclusion with my skies and Equipment this nebula is just too small to
get a really good nice details on it so I started saving up thinking okay in a few months I'll have
enough money to hire a remote Observatory to image the nebula and I picked telescope live as they had
reached out to me over a year ago and showed me their service a website got me signed up on there
and so I was already familiar with how it worked and I already had a paid account on the website so
all I needed to do was pay extra for an advanced request where you can put in the coordinates and
set up your Imaging plan plan with the filters however you want and the data is also yours it's
not shared but all of that does make it more expensive because you're tying up one of their
telescopes one of their remote robotic telescopes just for yourself rather than the whole group on
telescope live so the usual way this service works is it's shared data that you then buy a data set
but everyone has access to it in this case it's just my data so the telescope I picked for this
Advanced request is a 27.5 inch RC at f8 5600 millimeter focal length with a full frame qhy
600m at Bin 4 with astrodon lrgb filters and it's located in southern Spain which I understand is
one of the best spots in Continental Europe for astronomy because they get a lot of clear nights
and it was quite easy to submit this Advanced request I just added all the details to the form
I submitted it with my payment and waited a few weeks for the data to come back because I was I
wanted it to be at New Moon and so I was willing to wait for that I could only afford to do three
hours so I decided to split it up one hour of loom one hour of blue and 30 minutes each of red and
green so my big takeaway after all this is I think stuff is just you know just like this one is out
there all over the place just ready to be found and a big reason I'm confident there's still a lot
to be found is looking at astrobin lately I see lots of people making interesting discoveries all
the time the hard time-consuming part of making a discovery isn't really the hunt it's the research
lastly let me say a bit about the name I gave it it's traditional if you plan to keep finding more
objects to start a catalog and then you name them with your last name and then a number and
this started back with Charles Messier so we now have like you know Messier one Messier 2.
so assuming I find more stuff we can say this is Carver one and my next one will be Carver 2
and so on now amateur astronomers also have a fun tradition of naming nebulae and star
clusters after objects and animals and things that they sort of see in these structures and
this is where we get things like the monkey head and the jellyfish and the Running Man and
the North America nebula and so on and so on and sometimes you have to use your imagination a bit
with these names but where the hummingbird came to me was because I just this last spring had set
up a hummingbird feeder at my house right outside a window and I've just been fascinated looking at
the hummingbirds and seeing how when they're hovering in Flight right outside the feeder
you can just barely make out their wings not they're not distinct because they flutter so fast
and when I looked at this nebula I saw a bird-like shape here with the long hummingbird beak going
out with this straight line of stars and then the wings I thought just looked barely visible
just like when we see a hummingbird in flight and I also thought it was an appropriate name since
hummingbirds are obviously a small bird and so is this nebula it's it's only about four arc minutes
tall and one arc minute across I truly wouldn't be able to do any of this work without the generous
support of my patreon community you're seeing their names right now and if you got this far into
the video and you aren't a member I think you're the perfect candidate to join obviously because if
you're interested in the search for new deep Sky objects in the sky we're actually working on that
on my patreon right now as a group I have a longer version explaining some of the tools that I showed
in this video like Aladdin and the CDs portal and simbad and all that and then we also just finished
our first round of group exploration of the night sky it was one of our monthly Imaging challenges
and there were actually some galaxies found that we've we're still in the process but they might be
undiscovered uh so the so we might have actually found some discoveries right in our first try at
this so if this kind of stuff excites you consider joining it starts at just one dollar a month and
it's both how I keep the lights on here uh but also it's my favorite part of the job getting
to know other Astrophotographers and providing some structures for us all to get better at the
craft together really brings me a lot of Joy so if that sounds interesting you can visit
patreon.com nebula photos and sign up today till next time this has been Nico Carver clear skies