California Dreamin' under a full moon in the backyard

by Richard Crisp

After our rainy Friday night and a full moon I was not expecting to shoot any images this weekend but it cleared late yesterday afternoon so I decided to set up my widefield imaging rig and see if there was some widefield object in the northern part of the sky that I had not yet imaged. Amazingly enough it has been about two years since I last visited the California Nebula (NGC1499) and never had shot the full extent of it due to field of view limitations

This is nine exposures of 20 minutes stacked together for a total of 3 hours. It got pretty wet out there last night and I should have been using a dew heater, so I ended up having about two more hours of data ruined by a dewed over lens that I did not notice at the time.

Still with three hours it came out good enough I suppose, particularly considering the near-full moon and so on.

It got cold out there in the back and I needed to finally drag out some of the winter gear (head covering). The seasons are definitely changing. But what was interesting to me was that by midnight there was a slight breeze from the east that was bringing that mixed temperature wind: bits of warm and bits of cold that weren't well mixed. That happens each fall up here in Castro Valley. It is a weird feeling to be cold for one moment and then get a blast of warmish wind in the face.

http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/ngc1499_cm10_200mm_ha_page.htm

I used a 200mm Pentax medium format f/4 lens mounted to a Finger Lakes CM10XME camera (uses the same sensor at the venerable ST10XME from SBIG).

Posted on sf-bay-tac Oct 16, 2005 10:33:49 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 15, 2006 19:10:27 PT