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The Ghost of Cassiopeia (IC63) from Hubble WFC3 data reprocessed by Kyle Eberly — a hooked blue-white wisp of gas rising out of a deep-red hydrogen field, flecked with sharp blue stars.
Image data: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, proposal 14186 (WFC3/UVIS) — public archive. Reprocessed from drizzled archive mosaics by Kyle Eberly / Sitreps.

IC63 — The Ghost, Up Close

Hubble on the Ghost of Cassiopeia — reprocessed from the raw archive through my own pipeline

  • TelescopeHubble WFC3/UVIS (archival)
  • LocationLow Earth orbit (Hubble)
  • ProcessingPublic Hubble archive data in true RGB — red, green and blue are each literally one broadband filter, no narrowband, no palette. The deep red field isn't a color cast: it's the surrounding Sh2-185 hydrogen cloud, and the data insisted on it. The repair log for this one includes a camera chip seam that took four attempts to remove honestly.

What you're looking at

IC63 is a wisp of gas and dust about 550 light-years away, and it is actively being destroyed. The hooked shape isn't sculpted by anything in this picture — the sculptor is Gamma Cassiopeiae, a blue subgiant star 19,000 times brighter than the Sun sitting two degrees outside the frame, whose ultraviolet radiation is boiling the ghost away from the top down.

The blue glow is starlight from that same unseen star scattering off dust; the red fringe is hydrogen fluorescing under its ultraviolet — the ghost converts the radiation that's destroying it into the light that makes it visible.

In a few tens of thousands of years there will be no ghost here at all. This is a portrait of something mid-erasure.

The lesson

Everything that shapes this picture is outside the frame. The star carving the ghost, lighting it, and erasing it sits two degrees away — you will never see cause and effect in the same shot.

Most situations read the same way. The org chart you can see is the ghost; the forces shaping it — the budget decision three levels up, the customer who threatened to walk, the quiet sponsor — sit outside the frame. Reading the visible shape without asking what's shaping it is how you misread every room.

When something holds a strange shape, go find its Gamma Cassiopeiae.

Object data

Catalog
IC63 · the Ghost of Cassiopeia
Constellation
Cassiopeia
Type
Reflection + emission nebula, being photo-evaporated
Distance
~550 light-years
The sculptor
Gamma Cassiopeiae — 19,000× the Sun, outside the frame
Telescope
Hubble WFC3/UVIS · proposal 14186 (archival)
Filters → color
F475W → B · F625W → G · F814W → R (true RGB)
Companion entry
/astronomy/ic63-ghost-of-cassiopeia — my own Seestar capture

More from the journal

The Southern Ring Nebula (NGC 3132) — a JWST NIRCam image reprocessed by Kyle Eberly. A glowing oval shell of green and gold gas surrounds a purple interior, with two stars at the center, against a black sky dotted with background galaxies.
NGC 3132
The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula (M16) — a JWST NIRCam image reprocessed by Kyle Eberly. Towering rust-red columns of gas and dust rise diagonally against a deep-blue, densely starred sky, with crimson glints of newborn stars at the pillar tips.
M16
The Cosmic Cliffs in NGC 3324 — a JWST NIRCam image reprocessed by Kyle Eberly. A rugged, mountain-like ridge of orange-brown nebular dust runs across the lower half, studded with stars showing JWST's six-point diffraction spikes, beneath a deep-blue sky full of stars.
NGC 3324

One photo. One lesson.

New entries land when the sky cooperates. Get them by email — no schedule, no spam, just what the telescope caught and what it taught.