 One of the most fascinating things about amateur astrophotography to me is that we can still discover things out there that don't have a name yet because no one on Earth has noticed them before. And even though I've understood this on some level for years, it's always somehow seemed unlikely that I'd personally ever just stumble upon something brand new until I did just that. Here is a photo of my discovery, which is a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus that I've named the Hummingbird Nebula, or Carver 1. And I'll get into naming later in the video. What I'm going to do in this video in general is tell you about the story of this discovery, but also make it educational. So if you're interested in finding new deep sky objects out there yourself, I'll show you some tools that will make that easier both to find candidate objects to try photographing and how to research if something unusual you've found truly is a discovery. And that part of the process, confirmation that you've really made a discovery, is actually pretty tricky. There's going to be some serious time researching whether it's really a discovery and then what exactly it is that you've found. Is it a galaxy, a reflection nebula, a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula? With dim, smudgy objects, that actually can be harder than you think to tell what it actually is. But there are some clear signs that can indicate what it is, usually based on the star at the center or near it. The story of my discovery goes back to 2019. I was looking to create a unique image with a technique called mosaic imaging, where you extend your field of view by making an image in panels, and then you connect them back together in processing. For daytime photography, we commonly call this technique a panorama, but for some reason in astrophotography, we call it a mosaic, but it's the exact same thing. And I picked the cave nebula for this mosaic because I'd mostly seen close ups of the cave, and I thought it would be cool to get a more panoramic view, a more detailed but wide view of the area around the cave. And I can see from survey data, there's a lot of sort of interesting structures there in dark nebulae structures. So I spent most of my imaging hours in the summer and fall of 2019 on this project. And one of the neat things I found while working on it was this collection of dark nebulae that we're already known that sort of joined up to create this feature I dubbed the skeleton hand nebula. And when I published this photo on Astrobin, I hadn't spent a huge amount of time processing it. It was sort of just, I just want to put this out there, it looks cool. And so now fast forward to February 2023. And something I do with the group on my Patreon is we organize a monthly imaging challenge on the nebula photos discord. And in February, we picked dark nebulae as the challenge. And I always put up one of my older images as sort of an inspiration and an example for each monthly challenge submission. And so I put up this skeleton hand nebula image that again is taken in 2019. But looking at again in 2023, I remembered, oh, I always meant to reprocess that more carefully. So I went to my collection of external hard drives. I found 2019, I found the data. I'm a total digital pack rat, so I keep everything. And I found the original stacked data files. And this is what it looked like with just a screen stretch. But these days, what I often do in processing is I'll, while the data is still linear, I'll run StarNet or Star Exterminator, which removes the stars. I did that this time. And this little blue splotch just jumped out of me. It was just right in the center sort of the field. And I was like, what is that? I'd never noticed that before. So I pulled up all the different filters that I used and it wasn't there in the 03 data. It wasn't there in that shape in the HA data or the red. It was only strong in the luminance, the blue, and then faintly in the green. And so I thought that sort of indicates it's probably a reflection nebula. If it was a planetary, you'd probably see it stronger in the narrowband channels than the broadband channels. So at this point, I looked through the Vandenberg catalog, which is probably many of you know the main catalog for reflection nebulae, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And it wasn't there. So now I get a bit more serious with my research. I own Astrobin premium subscriptions. So all my images are advanced plate solved with Pix Insight. So that's just usually what I do to find coordinates. I just go back to the image and I can hover the cursor over wherever I want. And it tells me the coordinates. So I hover the cursor over where this reflection nebula is. And it gives me the coordinates in right ascension and declination in this box right here. I noted these coordinates down and I head over to this portal. This is the portal for all the databases that are a part of CDS, which again is this astronomical data center in Strausberg, France. And it's a resource used by astronomers all over the world. One way that it's used is if you're studying a specific object, usually a star, you can just type in the name of that star and find all the papers that have already been written about it. But another thing we can do with this tool is sort of like a reverse search. Instead of knowing the object name, I can just type in the coordinates in right ascension and declination. And then it's going to find all known objects in that area of the sky and list them down here where it says tabular data. And this first tab is Symbad, which is the main database for all the objects in the night sky, including stars, nebulae, galaxies, everything. This first column is telling you how close the object is to the coordinates that you put in. So you can see in this case there's only one object within an arc minute of the coordinates that I inputted. And so let's click on it. And this looks very promising. It looks to be a very well known star. There are a few clues this star is well studied. One is that there's lots of information about its type and color. And that's actually the right type. It's a B type star, meaning it's a blue star, which would give a blue reflection nebula. And then it has many cross references. There are 29 different identifiers for this star. And then most importantly, there are many references. There are 63 research papers that refer to this star in some way in their study. But again, there's all of this about the star, but there's no reflection nebula listed in Symbad. So it's possible that this is a star that's lighting up the dust to create the reflection nebula. So my next step is to determine, is there an error in my photo? Is this really a nebula or is it just maybe something wrong with my data? If it's real, it should show up in some of the professional survey data. So for this, we're going to use another CDS project called Aladdin, which is their interface for looking at survey data. And I'm just going to use Aladdin light here, which is the web version. And it's perfectly sufficient for my needs. There are some nice added features in the desktop version, but I don't need those here. All I need to do here is just paste in our coordinates in the upper left search box right here. And then I'm going to change the stretch on the survey data so that we can see the dim stuff a little bit better. I'm going to change it from linear right here to square root. And there we go. To me, this was all I needed really to know that I'm on the right track. It looks like a reflection nebula. It's obviously showing up stronger in blue than in red. And the shape matches exactly what I've captured. And now you might be wondering, so you didn't really discover it is right there in the survey data. How is it possible that no one has spotted this if it's in the digitized sky survey that's been around for decades? Well, the truth is there are still tons of undiscovered deep sky objects that will show up in the sky surveys if you know exactly where to look. But it's like finding a needle in a haystack. There are so many stars up there. And this is just this little tiny reflection nebula around one of them. So there are amateur astronomers who love doing this, scanning the digital sky surveys, looking for these unknown, uncatalogged objects. If that sounds of interest to you, it would be a great way to start making discoveries. Now, I have a more complete video on this topic on my Patreon, but I'll just say one more thing about it. If you do find something interesting in the DSS-2 data, the Digitized Sky Survey, it could be just what's called a plate fault. These images are digitized glass plates. And once in a while, there was a problem that made it into the scan. And some of these problems like pieces of dust or hair or something like that can look like unusual deep sky objects when they're really just a scanning mistake or an issue with the original glass plate. So always either confirm with your own images of the night sky or look at one of the other visible light surveys like Pan Stars or SDSS. And it should be there too, assuming we're talking visual band. Now, some of these surveys are infrared and other wavelengths of light, which can be very interesting and tell us more about an object. But I'm not going to go into all of that here. If you're interested in all this, join my Patreon and we can talk a lot more about it. All right, so we've now confirmed we have a potential reflection nebula on our hands. What's the next step? Well, what I did next was I went through this entire list of identifiers here for this star, and I added the word nebula. And I did a Google search and a Google images search and an Astrovin search for each of these combinations of terms. And eventually I got to searching V374 sep nebula. And this search actually returned a promising result on Google. It was a press release from Spitzer Space Telescope, which is an infrared telescope, a predecessor to the JWST. And they produced this beautiful image of the region that I'd originally photographed in my 2019 mosaic, but captured it in infrared light. And the star that I'm interested in, V374 sep, is specifically mentioned in the press release and in the picture as well. And it's the one that astronomers are interested in because it's thought to have this circumstellar disc of dusty material around it that is creating this cool hourglass shaped shadow in the infrared image. So this is super neat, but if I compare this red shape in the infrared image, it doesn't really line up with my blue reflection nebula. And so that's to be expected. Infrared light is going to show you different things than visible light. But in keeping with my research on this lead, I decided, okay, someone has to have imaged an invisible light right now. This is a well-researched star. So I keep going and going. Eventually I find an article written in 2002 that has emerged catalog of 913 reflection nebulae in our Milky Way galaxy. And then it has a really nice discussion of reflection nebulae in general. And I was especially drawn to the final paragraph where the author says, actually for a significant number of the objects included, nothing is known except for their coordinates. Meanwhile, many of them coincide with infrared sources. And that's the latest publication listing reflection nebulae that I could find, 2002, and my nebula wasn't listed. But this was still a good resource to look through and read the actual paper. It was really interesting both how little is known about many reflection nebulae and that they often coincide with interesting structures in infrared light, but that take on a different shape. Or often called morphology in the professional literature. I'd love to read more about this if anyone has some suggestions for articles. Also in this extended research, I went through all of the abstracts that mentioned the star V374CEP on ADS, which is another great service for astronomers. And on ADS, you can search and read through the abstracts for all kinds of astronomical research. And then they often link out to the archive, which is the main pre-print server for astronomy. And again, there you can read the full papers often before they've been published, but they've published a pre-print. In any case, none of the papers about the star that I could find mention a reflection nebulae or any kind of visible light imaging. So at this point, all signs are pointing to a discovery. So what do I do? Well, if this had been a potential planetary nebula, I could go to planetarynebulae.net and submit it and maybe get a response from Pascal Ledoux. And that's really cool, that there's a pathway to getting your planetary nebula discovery registered on an official site. But in this case, there was no hint of it in 03. The central star is a B type main sequence star, not a white dwarf, so we can rule out planetary nebula. There is no similar effort to catalog unknown reflection nebulae that I know about. If anyone knows differently, please let me know, because I'd love to submit this somewhere. I did ask Marcel Dressler about how to go about registering a discovery of a reflection nebula. And he suggested just announce it on Astrobin. So that is what I did on July 6th. And I also added an addendum of all the various names for this star in my description. So if anyone else comes across this nebula, they look it up on CDS like I did. And then they do a Google search of the star. It should now pop up if they search for that star name plus nebula. So I'm just sort of going back through how I researched it. And if anyone else finds this, hopefully they can then find my announcement on Astrobin. I started collecting new data for this in March from home. And unfortunately, this spring and early summer was just terrible weather-wise. It's raining right now, actually. And when it wasn't the cloudy weather or rain, it was wildfire smoke from the Canadian wildfires. So I made very little progress in several months on capturing new data. And I didn't even particularly like what I saw. So I sort of came to the conclusion with my skies and equipment, this nebula is just too small to get really good, nice details on it. So I started saving up thinking, OK, in a few months I'll have enough money to hire a remote observatory to image the nebula. And I picked Telescope Live as they had reached out to me over a year ago and showed me their service and website, got me signed up on there. And so I was already familiar with how it worked. And I already had a paid account on the website. So all I needed to do was pay extra for an advanced request where you can put in the coordinates and set up your imaging plan with the filters however you want. And the data is also yours. It's not shared. But all of that does make it more expensive because you're tying up one of their telescopes, one of their remote robotic telescopes, just for yourself rather than the whole group on Telescope Live. So the usual way this service works is it's shared data that you then buy a data set, but everyone has access to it. In this case, it's just my data. So the telescope I picked for this advanced request is a 27 and 1 half inch RC at f8, 5,600 millimeter focal length with a full frame QHY 600M at bin 4 with Astrodon LRGB filters. And it's located in southern Spain, which I understand is one of the best spots in continental Europe for astronomy because they get a lot of clear nights. And it was quite easy to submit this advanced request. I just added all the details to the form. I submitted it with my payment and waited a few weeks for the data to come back because I wanted it to be at New Moon. And so I was willing to wait for that. I could only afford to do three hours. So I decided to split it up one hour of bloom, one hour of blue and 30 minutes each of red and green. So my big takeaway after all this is, I think stuff is just like this one, is out there all over the place, just ready to be found. And a big reason I'm confident there's still a lot to be found is looking at astro bin lately, I see lots of people making interesting discoveries all the time. The hard time consuming part of making a discovery isn't really the hunt, it's the research. Lastly, let me say a bit about the name I gave it. It's traditional if you plan to keep finding more objects to start a catalog and then you name them with your last name and then a number. And this started back with Charles Messier. So we now have Messier one, Messier two. So assuming I find more stuff, we can say this is Carver one and my next one will be Carver two and so on. Now amateur astronomers also have a fun tradition of naming nebulae and star clusters after objects and animals and things that they sort of see in these structures. And this is where we get things like the monkey head and the jellyfish and the running man and the North America nebula and so on and so on. And sometimes you have to use your imagination a bit with these names, but where the hummingbird came to me was because I just this last spring had set up a hummingbird feeder at my house right outside a window. And I've just been fascinated looking at the hummingbirds and seeing how when they're hovering in flight right outside the feeder, you can just barely make out their wings. They're not distinct because they flutter so fast. And when I looked at this nebula, I saw a bird-like shape here with the long hummingbird beak going out with this straight line of stars. And then the wings I thought just looked barely visible just like when we see a hummingbird in flight. And I also thought it was an appropriate name since hummingbirds are obviously a small bird and so is this nebula. It's only about four arc minutes tall and one arc minute across. I truly wouldn't be able to do any of this work without the generous support of my Patreon community. You're seeing their names right now and if you got this far into the video and you aren't a member, I think you're the perfect candidate to join obviously because if you're interested in the search for new deep sky objects in the sky, we're actually working on that on my Patreon right now as a group. I have a longer version explaining some of the tools that I showed in this video, like Aladdin and the CBS portal and Simbat and all of that. And then we also just finished our first round of group exploration of the night sky. It was one of our monthly imaging challenges and there were actually some galaxies found that we were still in the process but they might be undiscovered. So we might have actually found some discoveries right in our first try at this. So if this kind of stuff excites you, consider joining. It starts at just $1 a month and it's both how I keep the lights on here but also it's my favorite part of the job. Getting to know other astrophotographers and providing some structures for us all to get better at the craft together really brings me a lot of joy. So if that sounds interesting, you can visit patreon.com slash Nebula Photos and sign up today. Till next time, this has been Nico Carver. Clear skies.