The Great Orion Nebula
Starless Edit
Image Details:
The Great Orion Nebula (also called Messier 42, or M42) is a bright area of stellar formation located roughly 1,400 l.y. away and is an impressive object both for visual astronomers and astrophotographers. Being bright, colorful, and located near the celestial equator it is relatively easy to capture with entry-level equipment, still rewarding to capture with advanced equipment, and is above the horizon in both hemispheres of our planet.
The nebula itself is a large cloud of mostly Hydrogen which has formed hundreds of new stars and the Hubble Space Telescope has observed hundreds of protoplanetary disks slowly forming into new solar systems. M42 also features a mixture of the many types of nebula seen in the night sky, including regions which emit light in emission lines (the magenta/pink emitted by excited Hydrogen atoms), broadband blue light (blue due to Rayleigh Scattering, the same process which causes our sky to appear blue), and absorbed light of the dark nebula (seen above the bright teal area). The teal color is also rare as the color Green is rarely observed in space. While comets often glow green due to ionized organic compounds, here it is caused by the excitation of Oxygen atoms.
The bright core of this nebula hosts 4 bright stars called the Trapezium (though more can be seen with stable air and higher focal lengths); these and other stars in the area often cause long exposure imagery to be whited out, necessitating the need for combining shorter exposures to recover details in these bright areas. In this case, the relatively short exposures used and the larger dynamic range of the camera used meant I fortunately did not have to do this.
Equipment:
Celestron C8 SCT (1280mm Focal Length) using F/6.3 Reducer
Canon EOS RP
Hypertuned Celestron CGEM-II
Exposures:
One-Shot Color: 254 x 30” (Total: 2h, 7m)
Misc Details:
Processing Software: PixInsight
Taken from: Wichita, KS, Bortle 5
Capture Dates: 14 March, 2023
