Saving Private Orion (M42 - ORI) - Spare Time Imaging on the Great Nebula (C8 EHD)
I felt that my previous quick attempt at M42, a
first light with the C8/ASI183MC, didn’t do enough justice to the C8 EHD scope. This time, a new capture with the ASI2600MC
At the start of some of my astrophotography-sessions in the late evening, I quickly captured some spare time on M42, before it moved into the fog of the low misty haze hanging over the horizon.
To make matters a bit worse in trying to capture Orion, that low hanging hazy band of smog is also being lit up by the glaring red led light of some tomato greenhouse (to boost plant growth at night -
See the image in one of the comments on a previous post)
Two nights, just over 1 hour in total, short captures to beat the hazy light pollution and try and preserve the core of M42. The trapezium is very distinctly visible and nicely ‘separated’ on my linear image, but in stretching I tend to blow it up a bit too much, in bringing out the other stars in the field. Maybe I’ll re-do the stretching of the stars once. Apparently, my stars seem to get this chromatic aberration across the star-field, which I haven’t been able to resolve (not a collimation problem, but probably a diffraction/debayer problem - I’ve already tried splitting the stars into Rob and re-aligning the channels, but no luck)
The nebula is a bit short on time, but I feel this image is doing a lot more justice to the C8 EHD scope …
The
Orion Nebula (also known as
Messier 42,
M42, or
NGC 1976) is a
diffuse nebula situated in the
Milky Way, being south of
Orion's Belt in the
constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest
nebulae and is visible to the
naked eye in the night sky with apparent magnitude 4.0. It is 1,344 ± 20
light-years away and is the closest region of massive
star formation to
Earth. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light-years across (so its apparent size from Earth is approximately 1 degree). It has a mass of about 2,000 times that of the
SunM42
C8, UVIR, ASI2600MC, EQ6-R Pro
30s 154x = 1h17
20230301-02
PixInsight
As an awareness message: ‘Saving Private Orion’ is also a phrase coined by the local astronomy/astrophotography community, to save our night skies from light pollution …
Happy to hear your thoughts …
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