The Little Cocoon Nebula is in the constellation Sagitta, a constellation most people have never heard of. It’s a dim constellation between Ophiuchus and Hercules but since most people have never heard of Ophiuchus either that probably doesn’t help. Well, that was the east/west direction so how about north/south. Then it’s between Vulpecula and Aquila. Well, that’s not helping. I guess there’s a reason people haven’t heard of it.

Your fun fact for the day is that Sagitta has nothing to do with Sagittarius. Sagitta means “arrow” in Latin because it made ancient people think of arrows. It doesn’t look like an arrow to me but I clearly lack the imagination necessary to name constellations.

With that diversion out of the way, on to the nebula!

The Little Cocoon (Sh2-82, LBN 128, LBN 129) is a reflection and emission nebula. It really does resemble the Cocoon Nebula. Whether either of them resemble a cocoon is left as an exercise to the reader.

It’s about 4,000 light years away according to the net though I haven’t found any authoritative source on that.

There is also a dark nebula, LDN 727, in the image though you won’t be able to identify it unless you go to astrobin and see the annotated version. It’s a small, relatively innocuous patch in the bottom left. Curiously, the long swatch of dark dust running through the image doesn’t seem to have a catalog number.

Normally, we do broadband images using LRGB filters or narrowband images using hydrogen alpha, oxygen III and sulfur II filters. Sometimes we combine hydrogen alpha with LRGB. But, this image, used all seven filters. If you have an interest in mage processing see the details on astrobin.

This was 40h 25m of data.