Josh Jones, taken from Pendleton, Oregon
Mandel-Wilson 1 (MW1) is not a traditional deep-sky object — rather it is made of extremely faint, wispy gas that lies outside the plane of our galaxy. While it appears to surround Polaris, it is in fact much more distant, lit not by a single star, but the overall glow of the Milky Way Galaxy. This type of object is called an integrated flux nebula, and the clouds that make up such objects are sometimes called galactic cirrus. The imager used an 11-inch f/2.2 Celestron RASA astrograph to take 12.75 hours of data in RGB filters.