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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Explore the field
Objects in this field 5 objects
5 objects
No matching objects.
- California NebulaNGC 1499
- NebulaAlso catalogued as LBN 756 · Sh2-220 · LBN 752 · Ced 26
- IC 2005
- Galaxy
- LDN 1462
- Dark nebula
- LDN 1463
- Dark nebula
- LDN 1464
- Dark nebula
About the labels and credits
Positions and outlines are calculated from a plate solution of this photograph. Outlines are catalogue guides and may not follow every visible filament. Additional catalogue objects may be faint or indistinct in this exposure.
Plate solving and annotation data: SkySolver, by Dominik Sito. Stars: Gaia DR3 and Hipparcos (ESA). Deep-sky data: OpenNGC © Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), SIMBAD and VizieR (CDS). Names: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and IAU WGSN. Catalogue overlay adaptations, including styling and selected display names, are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Photograph © Lee Pullen.
Imaging details
- Total exposure
- 31 hours
- Dates captured
- 27 November 2024 – 13 January 2025 (seven weeks)
- Location and sky
- Bristol, UK (Bortle 8)
Equipment and software
- Telescope
- Askar 130PHQ Flatfield Astrograph
- Camera
- ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro
- Mount
- Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro
- Guiding
- William Optics 50mm + ZWO 120MM Mini
- Control
- ASIAIR Plus
- Software
- PixInsight, Lightroom
- Image by
- Lee Pullen
Exposure by filter
Optolong L-Quad Enhance
- Channels
- RGB (stars)
- Subframes
- 30 × 2 minutes
- Integration
- 1 hour
View subframe and stack
Single subframe and integrated stack, both with a simple stretch applied.
Optolong L-Ultimate
- Channels
- Hα / OIII
- Subframes
- 216 × 5 minutes
- Integration
- 18 hours
View subframe and stack
Single subframe and integrated stack, both with a simple stretch applied.
Askar Colour Magic D2
- Channels
- SII / OIII
- Subframes
- 144 × 5 minutes
- Integration
- 12 hours
View subframe and stack
Single subframe and integrated stack, both with a simple stretch applied.
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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Buy from High Point Scientific
Guidescope: William Optics 50mm with ROTO Lock
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Buy from High Point Scientific
Guidecam: ZWO ASI 120MM Mini
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Buy from Astroshop.eu
Buy from High Point Scientific
Control: ASIAIR Plus
Read my review
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Buy from High Point Scientific
Filter: Optolong L-Quad Enhance
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Buy from Astroshop.eu
Buy from High Point Scientific
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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