NGC 1499 California Nebula

Here is a three hour exposure of the California Nebula NGC 1499. It's actually much larger that you see in this image but since I was shooting at my native focal length of 714mm with an APS-C sensor, I was only able to get part of it.

Equipment List

• Losmandy GM811G
• Stellarvue SVX102T
• PlayerOne Poseidon Color Camera with Sony IMS-571 sensor
• Off Axis Guider
• UV/IR Filter
• PlayerOne Xena M Guide Camera

Aquisition

• Lights: 94 Sub-frames at 120s.
• Darks: 25 frames at 120s
• Flats: 25 frames at 0.57s
• Flat Darks (Dark Flats?): 25 frames at 0.57s

Processing

Image Processing was done in PixInsight using their wonderful Weighted Batch PreProcessing Tool. This is a compilation of scripts to do everything from calibration all the way though background normalization.

• WBPP
  • Master Dark Generation
  • Master Flat Generation
  • Light Frame Calibration
  • Cosmetic Correction
  • Bad frames rejection
  • Image registration
  • Local normalization
  • Image Integration
  • Auto Crop
• Post
  • Dynamic Background Extraction
  • SPCC
  • Histrogram Stretch
  • Export To Tiff
• Lightroom
  • Adjust exposure
  • Adjust contrast
  • export to jpeg