Click here for a higher-resolution image

The Witch Head is a rather faint and very large reflection nebula located just two degrees west of the star Rigel in Orion. To get the necessary field of view (about 2 x 2.5 degrees) an Atik 460ex was paired with a Borg 60ED f/4 refractor with a focal length of just 240mm. This is a 3.5-hour LRGB exposure with 120:30:30:30 minutes of LRGB.

There are three NGC galaxies in this image, the most obvious being the nearly edge-on spiral NGC 1752 in the upper left portion of the image, which lies at a distance of about 150 million light years. The galaxy just to the upper right of NGC 1752 is PGC 16607. The other two NGC galaxies are in the upper right of the image, a little lower than NGC 1752. The two small fuzzy patches, fairly close to each other and at the endpoints of a vertical line, are NGC 1797 (top) and NGC 1799 (bottom). These are more easily seen in the high-resolution image.