he California Nebula - NGC 1499 - (turning lemons into lemonade)

On Friday night, the night I got my 3rd COVID vaccine dose, I had not yet started to feel terrible - so I went out to the Westport Observatory and set up my gear... I must have been already feeling somewhat badly as I made a few "rookie" mistakes as I started to shoot my targets for the night...
My first error was to focus on Capella to get a sharp focus on the stars, and then forget to reposition the telescope on the California Nebula... so I got an hour of frames on Capella. Not a bad mistake, just a waste of time... And then when I realized that, I redirected on the California Nebula, and then refocused - but forgot to remove my Bahtanov focusing mask... that's a small, inexpensive plastic device that helps you to achieve tack-sharp focus on point light sources (stars) 100% of the time by creating diffraction "spikes" around the brightest stars... This is also an example of how light behaves as both a wave and a particle, from my 11th-grade PSSC Physics class.

I then forgot to remove the mask and shot for about 90 minutes on the nebula WITH the mask on. To not waste the series, I processed it - you can see all the little rays of light around each and every star (diffraction spikes) all over the frame - but that said, it does not look all that bad (and it proves it was all in focus Lemons into lemonade...

NGC 1499 - a hydrogen emission nebula in Perseus. From Wikipedia:
The California Nebula (NGC 1499) is an emission nebula located in the constellation Perseus. It is so named because it appears to resemble the outline of the US State of California on long exposure photographs. It is almost 2.5° long on the sky and, because of its very low surface brightness, it is extremely difficult to observe visually. It can be observed with a Hα filter (isolates the Hα line at 656 nm) or Hβ filter (isolates the Hβ line at 486 nm) in a rich-field telescope under dark skies.[1] It lies at a distance of about 1,000 light years from Earth. Its fluorescence is due to excitation of the Hβ line in the nebula by the nearby prodigiously energetic O7 star, Xi Persei (also known as Menkib, seen at center below it in the inset at right).[2]
The California Nebula was discovered by E. E. Barnard in 1884.
By coincidence, the California Nebula transits in the zenith in central California as the latitude matches the declination of the object. (Wikipedia)

Shoot Details: NGC 1499
Date: 11/5/2021

Location: The Westport Astronomical Society
Lights: 27 @ 180s
Darks: 40
Flats: 40
Dark-Flats: 40
Bias: 135

Telescope: Astrotech 92mm refractor
Filter: STC Dual Narrowband - Ha/Oiii
Imaging Camera: Nikon D750 - astromodified
Guiding camera: ZWO ASI120mini
Guiding Software: PHD2
Integration Software: PixInsight. Photoshop
Mount: Celestron AVX
Diffraction spikes from leaving the Bahtanov Mask on the telescope