Target: Tadpole Nebula (IC434)
Date: February 15, 2026
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Fair with wispy clouds, 45°F, Wind: light, Moon: 4% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5
Integration: 360 x 60 seconds
This is a quick post and photo. We haven’t had many clear nights in the last few weeks, so I had to make do with the only night I could get outside in the dark.
Throughout the night, we had some high-level wispy clouds that kept rolling in and out while imaging. While it wasn’t ideal conditions for astro work, it looked like the best night in the 7-day forecast. The resulting stack wasn’t the best data, and the wispy clouds made for a pretty soft image. However, I’m happy with what I got.
Full Resolution: https://app.astrobin.com/u/justin_the_dark?i=hwo2mk
The Tadpole Nebula (IC 410) is a100 light-year-wide emission nebula located 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. It is famous for containing two, 10-light-year-long, tadpole-shaped pillars of gas and dust (Sim 129 and Sim 130) sculpted by intense radiation and stellar winds from the embedded young star cluster, NGC 1893.
We’re quickly approaching galaxy season, so I hope I get a few more clear nights to capture a few more winter nebulae.
Post-Processing Workflow
Software Used: PixInsight
Stacked in PixInsight with WBPP.
Dynamic Cropped Image.
Applied Seti Astro's AutoDBE.
Applied BlurXTerminator at default values.
Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
Applied NoiseXTerminator at 70% on starless image.
Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
Used MAS to stretch extracted images.
Combined Ha & OIII with Foray Palette Utility.
Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
Created Blue and Yellow masks.
Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.40 and SCNR checked.
Combined starless with star images with image blend script.
Exported as PNG.
