California Nebula, NGC 1499

The California Nebula is an emission area located in constellation Perseus. It appears to resemble outlines of State of California on long exposure photographs, like this one. It has a very low surface brightness and it's very difficult to observe visually. Distance from my hometown Oulu, Finland, is about 1000 light years.

Technical details

Processing workflow

Image acquisition, MaxiDL v5.07.

Stacked and calibrated in CCDStack2.

Deconvolution with a CCDStack2 Positive Constraint, 33 iterations, added at 50% weight

Color combine in PS CS3

Levels and curves in PS CS3.

Imaging optics

Tokina AT-x 300mm f2.8 camera lens

Mount

10-micron 1000

Cameras, filters and guiding

Imaging camera Apogee Alta U16 and Apogee seven slot filter wheel

Guider camera, Lodestar x 2 and an old spotting scope of Meade LX200

Astrodon filters,
5nm H-alpha 3nm S-II and 3nm O-III

Total exposure time

H-alpha, 7 x 1200 s, binned 1x1 = 2 h 20 min.
O-III, 2x 1200 s, binned 2x2 = 40 min==

Copyright: J-p Metsavainio