California Nebula

This glimpse into the universe is the California Nebula.It resembles an intra galactic seascape with the star, Xi Persei, rising above the horizon. The California Nebula is found in the Orion Arm of our Milky Way galaxy, around 1000 light years away,

This image is a combination of over 100 raw images obtained from a profesional institution-grade telescope located high on a mountain in Spain. For this image I rented time on a Planewave 24 inch telescope at the IC Observatory in Spain from Telescope.live and specified the target area of the sky I wanted and how many and what type of raw images I want.

When you take a photo, your camera shutter is only open for a fraction of a second, but astrophotography is different. This deep sky object is soooo dim that it required the camera shutter to be open for 10 minutes at a time for each image. Multiply that by the 106 raw files and you can see that it can take quite a while to collect enough light to capture these images.

The colors in this image are created by high energy radiation from the star, Xi Persei, illuminating gas clouds (a bit like Neon lights). The red colors are produced by energised Hydrogen and Silicon gas while the blue colors are produced by energised Oxygen gas.

Separate raw images are captured for each of the Hydrogen, Silicon and Oxygen wavelengths of light. These files can get quite large, this image was built from 3.5 Gb of data.

This raw data is then processed using specialised astronomical software (similar to what the Hubble team use) to produce the image you see here.

The end result is a spectacular galactic piece of wall art that has taken just over a 1000 years to reach my camera and then your wall.