Reflection Nebula Around V1331 Cyg (2013)

I love finding these sorts of things hidden away in the archive. This is a variable star named V1331 Cyg nestled within some clouds. It looks like a gate to some fantasy world. The blank quadrant in the upper right is actually the tip of a dust cloud present in the foreground. See some context here. V1331 Cyg is at the top center edge in Adam Block’s image.

The clouds are actually rather monochrome, I think. Some slight variations in color you see are due to some banding anomalies which are rather difficult to deal with. I greatly reduced some very large diffraction spikes and charge bleeds to a point where they are hardly visible. This makes it easier to see the cloud formations which are very near the star. There were also some very short exposures I used to make the central star really tiny.

Data came from two proposals: 11976 & 08216
Red: WFPC2 WF F814W (11976)
Green:  WFPC2 WF F606W (11976 & 08216)
Blue: WFPC2 WF F450W (11976)

North is NOT up. It’s 7.6° counter-clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.