This is my first light image through my new Ascar V telescope. This image was configured in its 60mm aperture, 360mm focal length version with its flattener installed. The scope has six different configurations, three as an 80mm scope and three as a 60mm scope, each using either a reducer, flatner, or extender.
This beautiful, fluorescing cloud is commonly known among astronomers as "The California Nebula" because, visually, through a telescope, it appears to be in the shape of that state. More formally, it is New General Catalogue (NGC) object 1499, about 1,000 light years from us in our own Orion arm of our galaxy. Like most bright nebulae, it is part of a much larger molecular cloud, so you see the portion of that enormous cloud illuminated by the bright star Menkib (Xi Persei), seen in the upper center of the image. This time of year, it is almost directly overhead in Central Texas in Perseus's constellation at about 1:00 AM.
I captured the data for this image on the night of 20-21 November from our back year here in Salado as my first image using my new Askar V telescope with 60mm aperture, 360mm focal length configuration, mounted on a ZWO AM5 harmonic, equatorial mount, using a ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera and the ZWO off-axis guider, autofocuser, and 8-position filter wheel with 36mm filters all controlled by a telescope-mounted ASIAIR+ computer. It resulted from 10 300-second exposures through hydrogen alpha, sulfur II, and oxygen III filters totaling 150 minutes and was processed using Astro Pixel Processor and Adobe Lightroom Classic.
