NGC1499 California Nebula

[WolfieGlos]

I first tried this one a year ago when learning the hobby, manually located it and framed it (it took over an hour to find it on a tracker by star hopping...all before I knew of plate solving!) and then only to find 3.5 hours of out-of-focus subs...so I had to remedy that mistake !

Anyway, here is my first "proper" attempt at the California Nebula imaged on 26th and 27th Feb, and 10th March with a large break due to poor weather.

Canon 800D (modded) + l-enhance, ISO-400.

120 x 300s subs (10:00:00) 30 flats+50 bias. Processed in Siril, Starnet, AstrodenoisePy and GIMP.

I may decide to go back and add some RGB stars, they just look nicer than pure white ones from the filter, but the forecast for 2 weeks is terrible.

Comments welcome. Hope you like  

[old_eyes]

Congratulations! That is a very nice California indeed. Good signal, plenty of fine structure and stars well controlled. 
 

The focus looks very slightly soft, but I don’t know if you were manually focusing or not. If it was manual my profound congratulations and envy. I could never get manual focus right.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry too much about RGB stars. UK clear skies are hard to come by, and I would not waste imaging time. To be honest I wasn’t looking at the stars at all, just the lovely nebula.

[WolfieGlos]

1 hour ago, old_eyes said:

Congratulations! That is a very nice California indeed. Good signal, plenty of fine structure and stars well controlled. 
 

The focus looks very slightly soft, but I don’t know if you were manually focusing or not. If it was manual my profound congratulations and envy. I could never get manual focus right.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry too much about RGB stars. UK clear skies are hard to come by, and I would not waste imaging time. To be honest I wasn’t looking at the stars at all, just the lovely nebula.

Thank you very much  

Yep, manual focus with a bahtinov mask when doing star alignment on the HEQ5. Sometimes I check focus during the session, but not for this one if I recall as it's also harder with the filter to see any stars using the mask !!

It might also look a bit soft from the noise reduction, often Astrodenoise can turn images very "plasticy" but without enough strength it leaves a lot of really random coloured pixels around the image so it's a bit of a compromise. Overlaying a stars layer then adds a bit of noise back in to reduce this effect ... who else adds noise to an image 🤣