Cue the organ music! The Phantom is in the house!

Ok, so the resemblance to the mask int he poster for the Phantom of the Opera is not exactly exact but it is evocative of that.

And, like the Face on Mars this Face in Space s purely a coincidence overstimulating the pattern matching parts of our brains, but, stimulate it does. I can’t look at this and not see a ghostly face peering out of the void.

The nebula is in Cassiopeia. The “face” is just a bit smaller than the full moon. I was not able to find any info about distance or size.

From a technical standpoint this is a faint nebula, really faint. I had to stretch this a lot to even make the hydrogen visible. The sulfur was even fainter and it turns out the oxygen was all but nonexistent. I even devoted a huge amount of time to try to tease out any faint oxygen signal but there wasn’t anything useful there. It did end up being instructive on just how far I could push faint signal before the image started to break down. I tried to find the right balance between contrast and smoothness and opted to stay on the smoothness side of the scale.

For more technical info see astrobin.