First Light of 2025: Capturing the Dolphin Nebula SNR

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Last weekend, I had the chance to embark on a two-night astro camping trip to a private site near Kissimmee Prairie Preserve in Central Florida. The weather was perfect for stargazing—clear skies with cool to cold temperatures, which is a bit of a rarity for Florida. I set up my new Sky-Watcher 150i strain wave mount alongside my not-so-new Askar FRA600 refractor and paired it with the ZWO 2600 Dou color camera. Over the course of two nights, I focused on capturing the Dolphin Nebula, gathering a total of 14 hours of data.

I combined it into a HOO (Hydrogen-Alpha, Oxygen-III) palette. The resulting image turned out beautifully, in my humble opinion! . It's always a great experience when you can spend a couple of nights under the stars, especially in such an ideal location, and walk away with an decent image. This happens to be my first image of 2025, which makes it even more special.

The Dolphin Nebula: it’s a star-forming region in the constellation Cetus, and it gets its name because the dark dust lanes kind of resemble the shape of a dolphin swimming through all the glowing gas and dust. The nebula’s got a bunch of young, hot stars that are responsible for ionizing the surrounding gas, which makes it one of the most interesting and beautiful spots to capture in the night sky.