Waiting in the wings

A faint blue-green cloud shaped like a squid stretches across the center of the frame, with two tapering lobes reaching left and right from a brighter, knotted middle. It floats against a much larger backdrop of deep red gas that fills the image in wispy, billowing curtains. Scattered white and pale-blue stars dot the scene.

Luigi La Bella from Melilli, Italy

The Squid Nebula (Ou4) is a faint cloud of oxygen about 2,300 light-years away in Cepheus, nested within the red hydrogen glow of the Flying Bat Nebula (Sharpless 2–129). Its prominent double lobes may be an outflow from a central triple star system, HR 8119. The imager took 43⅓ hours of exposure through a dual-band Hα/OIII filter with a 5-inch f/7 refractor, processed in an HOO palette.