NGC 1499 - The California Nebula - SHO (the.robservatory)

NGC 1499 - The California Nebula - SHO

NGC 1499 - The California Nebula

Being quite the amateur here, I mis-framed a number of exposures and was left with an askew-crop to work with. I decided to turn the nebula on its side to provide a new perspective that also plays to the movement of the imagery in this shot.

I acquired 35 hours of Ha, Sii and Oiii data over 7 nights from my Bortle 8 backyard in early January 2021. I could only bring myself to use 70% of this data set however, much of it riddled with bloated stars and trails due to amateur guiding issues and unexplained minor issues in acquisition.

I mapped the data to RGB in SHO, the Hubble Palette, and then layered Ha as luminance.

I used NINA to acquire the data and PixInsight and Photoshop to process it.

This turned out better than I had anticipated. I hope you like it too.

I drizzled the data 2x, the original TIFF is 250MB, 7600x5600. This 20MB JPEG was all I could share with Astrobin. Zoom in and I hope you enjoy it.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
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.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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