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A star field in Auriga photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro: a patch of bright red nebula is cut off by the right edge in the upper half of the frame and another by the left edge in the lower half, with a scattering of blue-white and orange stars between them.

IC 405 & IC 410 — The Flaming Star and the Tadpoles

A living entry: two nebulae, one framing mistake, and a second try to come

  • TelescopeEva (ZWO Seestar S50 Pro)
  • Integration208 minutes
  • LocationLakeway, TX
  • SkyBortle 6
  • CapturedNov 5, 2026
  • PhotoKyle Eberly · © 2026
  • ProcessingOne night, November 5, shot by the telescope robot: 416 thirty-second exposures through the dual-band filter, 3.5 hours, nearly all of them clean. The framing is the problem. I aimed at the midpoint between the two nebulae, hoping to fit both; they sit diagonally from each other and the frame is tall and narrow, so each one landed in a corner and was cut off. The data is good and stays in the stack. The next pass aims at each nebula on its own and stitches them. Processed from the telescope’s 16-bit stack with the same custom Python pipeline as the rest of this journal.

What you're looking at

The Flaming Star Nebula, IC 405, is about 1,500 light-years away in Auriga. The star that lights it, AE Aurigae, does not belong there: it is a runaway, flung out of the young cluster in Orion’s sword about two and a half million years ago, and it is now crossing this cloud at about 100 kilometers per second.

Its partner, IC 410, is much farther away, about 12,000 light-years. Inside it, a young cluster has sculpted two streams of gas into the Tadpoles, comet-shaped knots pointing away from the cluster’s light.

The two look like neighbours only because they lie in nearly the same direction from Earth, one roughly eight times farther away than the other.

The lesson

I aimed between the two nebulae to get both in one shot. The frame was the wrong shape for that, and the picture shows it: two half-nebulae in opposite corners.

I’m publishing it anyway, because 3.5 hours of clean data isn’t wasted. It goes into the stack once the next nights fill in the missing halves, and this version shows what the fix has to fix.

Show the mistake with the plan to repair it. A visible error with a plan beside it builds more trust than a quietly cropped success.

One photo. One lesson.

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Object data

Catalog
IC 405 (Flaming Star) · IC 410 (Tadpoles)
Constellation
Auriga
Type
Emission and reflection nebulae
Distance
~1,500 light-years (IC 405) · ~12,000 light-years (IC 410)
Runaway star
AE Aurigae, ejected from the Orion Nebula region
Status
LIVING ENTRY — 3.5 hours, re-framing in progress

More from the journal

NGC 2264 photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50, shown with south up: the small dark Cone Nebula sits in red glowing gas at the top, its tip pointing down toward the cluster, a loose triangle of stars and red nebula widens below it like a tree, and the bright blue-white star S Monocerotis sits at the base with a pale blue haze beside it.
NGC 2264
A tall five-panel mosaic of Orion photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro, north up: a tilted panel at upper left holds the Flame Nebula, the bright star Alnitak and the dark Horsehead against a red curtain of hydrogen; faint red haze and a dim star field fill the middle; the Running Man Nebula and the bright Orion Nebula sit at lower right. The black areas around the edges are sky outside the panels.
Orion
A tall widefield view of Orion’s sword photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro: the red and white Orion Nebula with its small round companion M43 in the lower half, the faint Running Man Nebula and the star cluster NGC 1981 above it, and the bright star Iota Orionis below.
The Orion Nebula