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Part of the California Nebula (NGC 1499) photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro: a broad band of red glowing hydrogen crossing the frame diagonally from lower left to upper right, brighter along a ridge near its middle, against a dark star field.

NGC 1499 — The California Nebula

A living entry: one cloudy night on a nebula five full moons long

  • TelescopeEva (ZWO Seestar S50 Pro)
  • Integration136 minutes
  • LocationLakeway, TX
  • SkyBortle 6
  • CapturedNov 5, 2026
  • PhotoKyle Eberly · © 2026
  • ProcessingOne night, November 5, shot by the telescope robot: 271 thirty-second exposures through the dual-band filter, 2.3 hours. Clouds rolled in just as the telescope turned to it, and roughly a third of the frames were lost to them. The nebula is longer than the S50 Pro’s field, so this frame holds its middle section, cropped from the full frame, with a thin stacking edge trimmed off the left side. 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 California Nebula is a cloud of hydrogen about 1,000 light-years away in Perseus, about 100 light-years long. On the sky it stretches about two and a half degrees, five full moons, which is why it doesn’t fit in one frame.

It glows because of one star: Xi Persei, a very hot, blue star near the nebula’s southern edge, whose ultraviolet light strips electrons from the hydrogen. When they recombine, the gas gives off the deep red light of hydrogen-alpha.

Big as it is, it is faint. E. E. Barnard found it by eye in 1884, through a six-inch telescope, and it is hard to see even in a large one.

The lesson

A third of this night was lost to cloud, which rolled in just as the telescope turned to this target. It kept shooting through the gaps.

Two and a quarter hours of a big, bright nebula is a usable start, and every later night stacks on top of it. Waiting for a perfect night would have produced nothing.

Start with the conditions you have when the work compounds. A partial result that the next attempt builds on beats a perfect one you never begin.

One photo. One lesson.

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Object data

Catalog
NGC 1499 · Sharpless 2-220
Constellation
Perseus
Type
Emission nebula
Distance
~1,000 light-years
Size on the sky
~2.5°, five full moons; this frame holds the middle
Lit by
Xi Persei, a hot blue star near its southern edge
Status
LIVING ENTRY — 2.3 hours from one night, deepening this week

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
The Cave Nebula (Sharpless 2-155) photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro: faint reddish-brown clouds across a dense star field, with a darker hollow near the middle bordered by a brighter red rim on its right.
Sharpless 2-155
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