Finally finished the color version! This was so far my toughest process. Since it's a 4 panel mosaic getting 4 different colors for 4 different panels aligned, calibrated and the same color intensity was crazy! This is a total of 15 hours of exposure but only about an hour per panel per filter. Since it's so bright I could only take 30 second exposures and had a total of 1792 files (54GB of data), and that's not counting the 116 I had to throw out due to clouds or the neighbors tree. But omg it was totally worth the work, it came out amazing!!!
I take an image of Orion every year around this time to check how I'm progressing since it was the first deep sky object I ever imaged, and this was this years. Although it's not Orion only, I wanted to test the processing skills of stitching stuff together and putting all the techniques I learned over the year to the test.
The coolest thing about this (for me at least) is that it was first photographed in October 1894 not too far from where I live in Mt. Hamilton. It's named after E.E. Barnard who was a famous astronomer at the Lick observatory. He imaged and documented it in Popular Astronomy(link below to the paper) through a lens he got off of a projecting lantern which is basically a projector back in those days. In the paper he describes having taken a 2 hour and a 1 hour and 15 minute exposure, I can't imagine doing this manually it has to be crazy! Anyway this will likely be the last image I finish this year, but there is an awesome one coming! Just need a few more clear nights 🙂
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1894PA......2..151B/0000151.000.html
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