49 Hours to Catch a Squid

To most people, this might just look like a pretty picture. But to astrophotographer Cem Diken, it’s the result of three years of chasing a nearly invisible ghost in the sky — the Squid Nebula (Ou4), hidden deep within the Flying Bat Nebula.

“It had been 8 years since I got into deep space astrophotography. I had imaged many targets in the northern hemisphere with my first telescope… but I wanted a bigger challenge.”

Cem started capturing the hydrogen signal from Bortle 9 skies in Istanbul — “I completed the Ha data with a solid hydrogen filter and 75 frames. But OIII? It seemed impossible in Bortle 9.”
Determined, he packed his gear and drove 800 km to Datça, a Bortle 3 region by the sea. For six nights, he battled wind, humidity, and stubborn summer heat. “Even at night, the max temp my ZWO cooler reached was -7.8°C,” he recalls.

Unfortunately, back in Istanbul, he discovered that more than half the data was unusable.

But Cem didn’t give up.

“The next year, I drove another 300 km and climbed to the Hendek Sükümen valley — 1800 meters up. Just for OIII. Four more nights. This was starting to turn into an obsession.” As a result, he had a total of about 49 hours of clean data. The image finally came together — the ethereal blue glow of Ou4, faint and delicate, rising from the red wings of Sh2-129.

“It was a great challenge — a fight with myself. There can always be better, more beautiful images… but for me, this was a turning point. Enough passion is the biggest secret to doing anything.”