The sky is filled with thousands of amazing objects for you to explore with binoculars or a small telescope. I’ll be highlighting an interesting object or group of objects in this new daily series, Deep-Sky Dreams. This takes me back to my earliest days in amateur astronomy, when I had a pair of binoculars, a Celestron 8 telescope, and a voracious appetite for exploring what was out there.
Starting high in the Northern Hemisphere sky, I’ll be highlighting lots of stuff over the coming weeks and months. I’m going to start with the Cepheus Molecular Cloud, a rich region with some interesting objects on the border of Cepheus and Cassiopeia.
This rich region contains several emission nebulae, clouds of mostly hydrogen gas that will form infant suns, and a variety of young open star clusters. A challenge for visual observers, but frequently photographed, the big emission nebula NGC 7822 arches over the region. Just to its south lies a brighter, smaller patch of nebulosity catalogued as Cederblad 214, which is also associated with a small open cluster, Berkeley 59. Well to the south of these objects lies a tiny, circular emission nebula, Sharpless 2–170. These are all pretty obscure objects, but together they make up an unusual and rarely observed region in the northern Milky Way. If you have a chance, check it out on the next dark, clear, moonless night.
