The California Nebula, NGC1499

Image Critiques Nightscape & Astro Critiques
1

NGC1499 California Nebula.jpg
NGC1499 California Nebula.jpg2000×1411 1.4 MB

Critique Style Requested: Standard

The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.

Description

This is the last capture from the recent string of several clear dark nights. I was able to track it for over 7 hours of 2-minute exposures – 221 frames.

Specific Feedback

All comments welcome!

Technical Details

Astro rig: tracker, astro camera and refractor scope with 640mm equivalent field of view. Controlled and monitored (after setup and polar alignment) with an iPad from the comfort of the house. Processed in PixInsight. Only went into LR/PS to crop and ship out the JPEG. Color was determined by the Spectrophtometric Color Calibration process in PI, and I left it alone. It should be quite accurate, although the first hour of exposures had some light from the setting moon and I still haven’t looked into what effect that would have on nebula colors.

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2 Likes
2

Diane,

This is really nice. That star field is amazing. The number of stars just blows me away on seeing them and by just contemplating how there are. Your gear did a great job in tracking, the stars are so perfectly round and I love the glow around the large star Menkib. I like learning the names of the stars and thanks to Stellarium for that.

3

Thanks, @Youssef_Ismail! Learning (or remembering) star names is beyond me.

It pays to have a good tracker and have guiding software, but being able to get excellent polar alignment is a bigger factor for round stars. The roundness of the stars isn’t atmospheric turbulence averaged in – each sub had the same star shapes/sizes you see here. The huge difference with camera lenses is the size distribution. I can get some of it with my 14 and 28, but not like this.