What started off as a 3 panel mosaic covering The Great Nebula in Orion, The Horsehead, Barnards Loop and M78 soon became a much larger project including over 20 deep space objects and the majority of the Orion Molecular Cloud. The final mosaic image covers 13.5 x 6.8 degrees of our night's sky.
The detail captured in this image is best seen by looking at the 1.99 arcsecond per pixel full resolution 1.8 gigabyte mosaic which can be viewed in full resolution here:
https://tinyurl.com/2mzfvybsDominating the night sky from December through March, the ancient constellation Orion is one of the most famous and most photographed star groups in the heavens. The ancient Greeks associated these stars with a mighty hunter adorned with a belt and sword, holding a westward facing shield in his left hand and an upraised club in his right. These stars were even included in the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien where they were called Menelva-gor, the “Swordsman of the Sky”Captured over 14 nights from Grand Mesa Observatory. Total integration time of 33 hours.
Here are the details:
Captured and processed by Nicolas Rolland, Tom Masterson and Terry Hancock
Location: GrandMesaObservatory.com Purdy Mesa, Colorado
www.grandmesaobservatory.comCamera: QHY367 Pro C Full Frame One Shot Color CMOS
Optics: Takahashi E-180 Astrograph
Image Acquisition software Maxim DL6
Pre-Processed in Pixinsight, PTGui
Post Processed in Photoshop, Pixinsight, Registar
Comments