THE CALIFORNIA NEBULA
NGC 1499 • Emission nebula • Perseus • 1000 light-years from Earth
🔭
Askar 130PHQ
📷
ZWO 2600MC Pro
🌃
Bortle 8
⏱️
31 hours
🗓️
Nov ’24 – Jan ’25
Overview
The California Nebula, also known as NGC 1499, is a vast cloud of gas and dust in the constellation Perseus, stretching across an area of sky larger than the full Moon. Its red glow comes from hydrogen gas excited by radiation from nearby hot stars. Despite its size, the California Nebula is extremely faint to the eye, making it a challenging target from light polluted locations. Astrophotography is essential to reveal its structure and subtle detail.
Background
This turned into quite a long project — seven weeks in the end — due to a combination of technical issues and bad weather. I’m hopeful that the tech aspect is fixed now (suspected power problem with my ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro camera), but it did mean that I couldn’t gather as much data as I wanted for this target. In particular, my Askar D2 (SII/OIII) time was cut short, and I had to settle for just 12 hours using this filter. Really I wanted twice this, in order to get a decent signal-to-noise ratio in those channels.
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Kit list
This is the equipment I used to capture the image.
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Telescope: Askar 130PHQ
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Camera: ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro
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Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro
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Guidescope: William Optics 50mm with ROTO Lock
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Guidecam: ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
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Control: ASIAIR Plus
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Filter: Optolong L-Quad Enhance
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Filter: Optolong L-Ultimate
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Processing walkthrough
By the time I was able to process the data, a new AI model for NoiseXTerminator for PixInsight had been released, so I was able to use it on my data. It’s really good, and I look forward to using it more for future images. Perhaps even better though, I discovered Seti Astro’s Perfect Palette Picker script, which makes combining data so easy. It even caters for OSC imagers like myself that use Hα/OIII and SII/OIII dualband filters. Check out my processing tutorial below to see it in action.
It seems like every week or so another great process is released for PixInsight. This can make it hard to keep up, but of course overall it’s a good thing. I’m tempted to re-process some older data using these new tools…
See below for a full video walkthrough of how I processed the image. Note that the final version shown on this page had a few extra tweaks to the colours.
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Example source data
Here are example single subframes and freshly integrated stacks, just with simple stretches applied.
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