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The Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 — the bright shock arc curving along the left side of the frame with braided red filaments, fainter wisps of the shell across the upper frame, and the bright star Eta Geminorum at the top right corner.

IC 443 — The Jellyfish Nebula

A living entry: 24 minutes became four and a half hours, and a winter to come

  • TelescopeDarth Vader (ZWO Seestar S50)
  • Integration267 minutes
  • LocationLakeway, TX
  • SkyBortle 6
  • CapturedOct 20, 2026
  • PhotoKyle Eberly · © 2026
  • ProcessingVersion two. The first version was a 24-minute scouting frame; this one stacks three nights, up to four and a half hours where they overlap. The telescope robot shot the newest session last night, aimed at the remnant’s catalog center for the first time, and every night was aligned star by star before combining. The bright shock arc is now joined by fainter wisps of the shell. Most of the jellyfish’s body is still under the noise floor, and the infrared view below shows how much is left to earn. This entry keeps deepening through the winter.

What you're looking at

IC 443 is a supernova remnant — the expanding wreckage of a star that detonated somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago, about 5,000 light-years away in Gemini. The bright arc in my frame is the shock front, still moving at around 100 kilometers per second, lighting up where it plows into surrounding gas.

This remnant is a rarity: astronomers found the collapsed core. A neutron star (CXOU J061705.3+222127) is plowing through the southern edge of the shell, the crushed remains of the star that exploded — a city-sized sphere flung outward by its own detonation.

It's the third supernova remnant in this journal, and the three now form a timeline: the Crab is 1,000 years old and still electric; the Veil is 10,000 years old, lace pulled thin; the Jellyfish is 30,000+, ragged and dissolving into the clouds it hit. Same event, three ages — the full life cycle of an explosion.

The lesson

I published this one unfinished, on purpose. Twenty-four minutes of data, one bright arc, most of the jellyfish still under the noise floor — and next to it, NASA's infrared view showing everything I hadn't earned yet. Three nights later it's four and a half hours, and still unfinished.

That gap between the scouting frame and the map is the plan, written in photons: I know exactly what months of winter nights are supposed to produce, because it's sitting right there in the comparison.

Most people hide the before picture until they have the after. Publishing the before first is the stronger move — it puts the goal where you can't quietly abandon it.

The same jellyfish, in infrared — NASA’s WISE space telescope

The Jellyfish Nebula field in infrared from NASA WISE data, placed on the same framing as the backyard photo — a ragged ring of warm orange emission around the middle of the frame, with the bright star Eta Geminorum and its diffraction spikes at the top right.
The identical patch of sky, in heat instead of visible light. In infrared the whole shell shows up as a ragged ring around the middle of the frame. Much of that glow comes from molecular gas the blast wave has shocked and heated as it slams into a dense cloud, gas my camera can barely see. The optical arc at the left of my photo is the part of the shell running through thinner gas, where the shock lights up hydrogen instead. Eta Geminorum blazes at the top right in both views.

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech, WISE (ALLWISE atlas tiles), public archive via IRSA. Five-tile mosaic, reprocessed by Kyle Eberly / Sitreps; the backyard frame was plate-solved against the ESA Gaia catalog to place it.

My telescope
ZWO Seestar S50 — 50 mm lens, visible light, 4.5 hours so far
This telescope
WISE — a 40 cm space telescope above the atmosphere
The light
3.4, 4.6 and 12 µm infrared — heat the atmosphere never lets through
The data
Five ALLWISE sky-atlas tiles from NASA’s IRSA archive, plate-solved against the Gaia star catalog so the infrared lands on my exact framing

Publishing the archive view before my own shot is finished inverts the usual order — and that’s the point. The WISE frame is the map; the winter’s shooting is the territory. Come back in a few months and compare.

One photo. One lesson.

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Object data

Catalog
IC 443 · Sharpless 2-248
Constellation
Gemini
Type
Supernova remnant
Age
~30,000–50,000 years — the journal’s oldest remnant
Distance
~5,000 light-years
Inside it
A neutron star, found plowing through the southern shell
Status
LIVING ENTRY — 4.5 hours over three nights, deepening all winter

More from the journal

A nineteen-frame mosaic of the full Veil Nebula photographed from Lakeway, Texas with two Seestar telescopes: the Eastern Veil arc at left, the filaments of Pickering’s Triangle at upper center, the Western Veil running down the right side past the bright star 52 Cygni, and faint red filaments of the southern rim across the bottom, north up.
The Veil Nebula
A section of the Veil Nebula from Hubble WFC3 data reprocessed by Kyle Eberly — braided teal oxygen ribbons and red hydrogen filaments sweeping diagonally across the upper frame, above a dark field laced with faint red gas.
The Veil
The Crab Nebula (M1) photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 — a mottled oval of reddish filaments and a bluish interior glow, in a Taurus star field.
M1