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First 24 minutes on the Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 — the bright northeastern shock arc showing braided filament texture against a dense Gemini star field.

IC 443 — The Jellyfish Nebula

A living entry: 24 minutes down, a winter of hours to come

  • TelescopeZWO Seestar S50
  • Integration24 minutes
  • LocationLakeway, TX
  • SkyBortle 6
  • CapturedOct 18, 2026
  • ProcessingThis is a scouting frame, published on purpose: 141 ten-second subs grabbed pre-dawn while the other telescope worked the Rosette. Only the bright shock arc has surfaced so far — but it already shows braided texture, which is the tell that hours of integration will pay. This entry is a living one: I’ll keep stacking sessions on it through the winter and re-render as it deepens. Watch the integration number grow.

What you're looking at

IC 443 is a supernova remnant — the expanding wreckage of a star that detonated somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago, about 5,000 light-years away in Gemini. The bright arc in my frame is the shock front, still moving at around 100 kilometers per second, lighting up where it plows into surrounding gas.

This remnant is a rarity: astronomers found the collapsed core. A neutron star (CXOU J061705.3+222127) is plowing through the southern edge of the shell, the crushed remains of the star that exploded — a city-sized sphere flung outward by its own detonation.

It's the third supernova remnant in this journal, and the three now form a timeline: the Crab is 1,000 years old and still electric; the Veil is 10,000 years old, lace pulled thin; the Jellyfish is 30,000+, ragged and dissolving into the clouds it hit. Same event, three ages — the full life cycle of an explosion.

The lesson

I'm publishing this one unfinished, on purpose. Twenty-four minutes of data, one bright arc, most of the jellyfish still under the noise floor — and next to it, NASA's infrared view showing everything I haven't earned yet.

That gap between the scouting frame and the map is the plan, written in photons: I know exactly what months of winter nights are supposed to produce, because it's sitting right there in the comparison.

Most people hide the before picture until they have the after. Publishing the before first is the stronger move — it puts the goal where you can't quietly abandon it.

The same jellyfish, in infrared — NASA’s WISE space telescope

The Jellyfish Nebula field in infrared from NASA WISE data, star-registered to the same framing as the backyard photo — the remnant’s shock ridge crossing mid-frame through a wall of warm dust, with the bright star Eta Geminorum blazing with diffraction spikes at lower left.
The identical patch of sky in heat instead of visible light — and it shows why this target is hard: the Jellyfish sits in front of a wall of warm dust (the Gem OB1 cloud complex, upper frame), and its shock ridge crosses the middle of all that glow. The brightest knot near center is where the blast wave is slamming into a dense molecular cloud. The blazing star with the diffraction spikes is Eta Geminorum — a naked-eye star, and WISE’s optics make no apology for it.

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech, WISE (ALLWISE atlas tiles), public archive via IRSA. Five-tile mosaic, reprocessed and registered to the backyard frame by Kyle Eberly / Sitreps.

My telescope
ZWO Seestar S50 — 50 mm lens, visible light, 24 minutes so far
This telescope
WISE — a 40 cm space telescope above the atmosphere
The light
3.4, 4.6 and 12 µm infrared — heat the atmosphere never lets through
The data
Five ALLWISE sky-atlas tiles from NASA’s IRSA archive, star-registered onto my exact framing

Publishing the archive view before my own shot is finished inverts the usual order — and that’s the point. The WISE frame is the map; the winter’s shooting is the territory. Come back in a few months and compare.

Object data

Catalog
IC 443 · Sharpless 2-248
Constellation
Gemini
Type
Supernova remnant
Age
~30,000–50,000 years — the journal’s oldest remnant
Distance
~5,000 light-years
Inside it
A neutron star, found plowing through the southern shell
Status
LIVING ENTRY — 24 min down, deepening all winter

More from the journal

A section of the Veil Nebula from Hubble WFC3 data reprocessed by Kyle Eberly — braided teal oxygen ribbons and red hydrogen filaments sweeping diagonally across the upper frame, above a dark field laced with faint red gas.
The Veil
The Crab Nebula (M1) photographed from Lakeway, Texas with a ZWO Seestar S50 — a mottled oval of reddish filaments and a bluish interior glow, in a Taurus star field.
M1
The Eastern Veil Nebula photographed with a ZWO Seestar S50 Pro on its first night of use — braided red and blue supernova filaments in a wide 4K star field, with faint wisps of other sections of the Cygnus Loop visible toward the frame edges.
The Eastern Veil

One photo. One lesson.

New entries land when the sky cooperates. Get them by email — no schedule, no spam, just what the telescope caught and what it taught.