NGC1499 California Nebula (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Perseus (Per)

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NGC1499 California Nebula

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NGC1499 California Nebula

Here is my image of the huge and complex California Nebula (NGC 1499). It is located 1,000 light years from Earth arcing high across our northern winter sky in the constellation Perseus. It is fairly close to the Pleiades, which was the subject of my last astro image. And like our solar system, it lies in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. We're practically neighbors!

The nebula continues to the left of this image and some people think that the full shape looks like the state of California, but I think that's a stretch. Still, I find it to be a particularly beautiful mix of ionized hydrogen and dense dust lanes. The gases are fluoresced by the energetic star Xi Persei below the edge of this image. The entire nebula spans about 100 light years, which is over 580 trillion miles.

I made this image from the best of 35 300-second exposures through my Baader dual-bandpass filter (Hα and OIII) at 1630mm focal length (0.7X reducer), calibrated with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5468864
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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NGC1499 California Nebula

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