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Seeing California as a "Red State" can be a dream or a disaster depending on your political affiliation. While we won't find out the latest political coloring of California for another year, this "California" has been glowing red for around a hundred thousand years.

This is a three panel mosaic using the TMB152 and STL-6303 at JMSM Observatory. Each panel is composed of images exposed through hydrogen-alpha (Ha), red, green, and blue filters. The Ha filtered data was used for the entire nebula in the red channel of the final image - while the red filtered data was used only for the stars. A fraction (15%) of the Ha data was also added to the blue filtered image to create the blue channel.

Click the image above to view larger versions of the California Nebula.

The California Nebula has always been an interesting object for me - I've just never had the right opportunity to image it. Even now, the equipment was not quite suited to this large object - I probably should have added at least another three panels to this mosaic to capture the rest of the nebula. I had the sky time available for the three panels, so I went for it.

The California Nebula is commonly recorded as 1500 light years away, although the exact distance is not known. At this distance, the full reach of the visible nebula is around 100 light years from end-to-end. The full angular size of the nebula is recorded as 4 degrees across (over 8 times the width of the full moon), although it is commonly listed as ~2.5 degrees across which is what is shown here.

The visible nebula is probably only a small portion of a much larger dust cloud. The bright star at the top of the image (Menkib or Xi Persei) is the likely the cause of the of the radiation that is exciting the dust cloud and giving us this view of California. The radiation from Menkib is not just exciting the hydrogen atoms in the dust cloud, but it is also pushing it away - causing the turbulent view in what could be the Sierra Nevada Mountains region.