The Witch Head Nebula is an excellent example of a reflection nebula. The nebula is believed to be illuminated by the nearby bright star, Rigel. Because Rigel is very blue in color, the nebula appears blue as well. The 50 light year long nebula may have originated as the remnants of a supernova.

The nebula is a rather large and a very faint visual object. The main part of the nebula spans approximately 3 degrees by 1 degree of sky and is nicely framed in this 6 degree by 4 degree widefield image. Careful inspection of the high resolution image will also reveal about a half a dozen nice background galaxies.

In this image, North is to the right.

Exposure Details
Lens	Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM
Focal Length	200mm
Focal Ratio	f/3.5
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 Byers gear
Guiding	ONAG On-Axis Guider via C-8, Lodestar autoguider, PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified
Exposure	95 subs of 300 sec @ ISO 800 - just under 8 hours
Calibration	20 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	February 4 and 6, 2013
Temperature	42F on 2/4, 40F on 2/6
SQM Reading	21.2 (Bortle 4) on 2/4, 21.3 (Bortle 4) on 2/6
Seeing	4/5 on both nights
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 5.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, star shrinking and halo reduction, smoothing and noise reduction. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, high pass filter, star shrinking, screen mask invert, lab color, vibrance, saturation adjustments, selective color, and match color. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Carboni Tools for additional noise reduction, and smoothing. Registar for aligning stacks and for color channel alignment. Focus Magic for focus restoration.
Notes	I have wanted to photograph this target for quite awhile, but its large size was not practical with the limited field of view of my Celestron C-8. Having recently acquired my 200mm Canon lens, this object was high on my list to finally capture. I'm very happy with this result, as the nebula has a beautiful color and wonderful details. This image was published by Astronomy Magazine as its Picture of the Day for May 22, 2014!