California gleaming


A long, diagonal ribbon of glowing gas stretches across a dark, star-flecked sky, bright orange-red along its upper edge and fading into pale blue-green toward the bottom. A single bright white star sits near the cloud's lower edge, with countless fainter stars scattered through the background.

Andrei Pleskatsevich from Minsk, Belarus

The California Nebula (NGC 1499), is a roughly 2.5°-long cloud of glowing hydrogen gas in Perseus between 1,000 and 1,500 light-years away, lit by ultraviolet light from the nearby star Xi Persei. The imager collected 8⅓ hours of exposure through a 3-inch f/4.5 refractor with a quad-band filter and one-shot color camera.