The California Nebula (NGC 1499)

Overview

I made a pretty big upgrade to the filter set used on my small wide-field telescope and this project was a first go of being able to test both the narrowband filters (Ha, O3, S2)  and RGB broadband filters.

The California Nebula (NGC 1499) is one I’ve wanted to revisit since I ran out of time working on a mosaic of it a few years back. The object is a large emission nebula in the constellation Perseus and can be found near the Pleiades in the Fall/Winter sky. It has a low surface brightness so it’s hard to visually observe when compared other bright nebula like Orion. It’s only about 100 ly distance form us, but is very long at about 60 ly across.

This project combined 25.25hrs narrowband data with 5 hrs of broadband to create a composite image replacing the narrowband stars with RGB stars for a more natural star coloration.

While this my second go at this target, I knew I needed to do it justice by imaging it using a widefield telescope