NGC 1499: California Nebula

12 December 2022

The new moon came and went but the clouds stayed the whole time. So aside from the single instance capturing broadband data for the Triangulum Galaxy, the conditions for astrophotography were rather bad.

So on the next clear night, and although it was a moonlit night, I busted out my telescope to shoot a target from which I knew it would give some good h-alpha data: NGC 1499 also known as the California Nebula. It's quite some time since I took a photo of this particular nebula and I remember that I had a very hard time getting the bright red nebula to the state where I wanted it. Of course, this was all due to the stock DSLR which is simply not that sensitive in the h-alpha emission line.

With the result I got I am not quite as happy as I wanted to be: First I planned on shooting with a broadband filter to get descend star colors and second I did not get much signal from the green and blue channels which ultimately leads to a not so colorful image.