- NGC 1499 California Nebula
NGC 1499 is a large, relatively bright emission nebula in the constellation Perseus. Its common name comes from the fact that, when viewed where the nebula is oriented with its long dimension up-and-down (rotate my image 90 degrees clockwise), it bears a resemblence to the shape of the state of California. It was discovered by E. Barnard in 1885. The nebula is quite large (around 2.5 degrees in length) and glows with an apparent magnitude of around 6. The red color comes from Hα emissions generated by ionization of the nebula's hydrogen cloud by ultraviolet radiation from the nearby star ξ Persei (Menkib), which is the brilliant blue star above the nebula in my image. Menkib is a Class O supergiant with a visual magnitude of 3.98. It is located 1254.5 LY from us. This distance corresponds to the distance to the nebula, which is usually quoted as being around 1000 Ly. The actual size of the nebula is around 105 LY long.
This nebula is too large to fit into a single image frame using the SOCO imaging system. To produce the image shown above, I mosaiced three separate images acquired of the nebula— each covering about a third of the nebula (each with a bit of overlap). The three color composite images were then mosaiced in Photoshop to produce the final image of the nebula.
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