Imaging the Spider Nebula from Pontypool

IC 417 - Spider Nebula

Tuesday night brought one of those welcome breaks in the Welsh weather. With clear skies settling over Pontypool, it felt like the perfect opportunity to get the Dwarf 3 digital telescope outside and pointed at something a little more unusual. My target for the evening was the intriguing Spider Nebula.

Astrophotographers often use the nickname “Spider Nebula” for the planetary nebula IC 417, sometimes also associated with similar spider-like filamentary nebulae in astrophotography circles because of their distinctive, leg-like structures spreading outward from the centre.

Despite its delicate appearance, the Spider Nebula is the aftermath of a violent stellar death. It lies roughly 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga, in a region rich with gas and star formation. What we see today is the glowing debris from a massive star that shed its outer layers into space. Ultraviolet radiation from nearby young stars excites the surrounding hydrogen gas, causing it to glow in the deep red wavelengths that astrophotographers capture so well.

The nebula itself spans around 100 light-years across, which gives some perspective on the enormous scale involved. Structures that appear as fine threads in an image are actually vast clouds of gas stretching for many light-years. The “spider” appearance comes from arcs and filaments of ionised hydrogen that radiate through the nebula like long legs.

Objects like this are faint, which makes them perfect targets for smart telescopes such as the Dwarf 3. During the session, the telescope quietly stacked exposure after exposure, gradually pulling those faint structures out of the darkness. At first, the field looked fairly ordinary, just a scattering of stars, but after a while, the subtle glow began to appear, followed by the delicate wisps that give the nebula its nickname.

One of the most remarkable aspects of imaging something like this is the timescale involved. The light recorded by the telescope began its journey towards Earth around 10,000 years ago, long before written history in Britain. On a calm, clear night in Pontypool, that ancient light finally ended its journey on a small telescope sensor in the garden.

That’s the quiet magic of astrophotography: capturing the distant echoes of stellar events that unfolded thousands of years in the past. 

Settings used

Dwarf Labs 3 Digital Telescope

Tripod.

30 Second exposure

80 Gain

250 stacked images

EQ Mode ( Tracking)

Processing

Stella Studio ( this is excellent)

Exported stacked image as PNG

Editing in Luminar Neo

Colours boosted - saturation and vibrance

Sharpening and Denoising all within Luminar.

Turned the image 180 degrees, as to me, the nebula looks more like a spider.