Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Orion (Ori)  ·  Contains:  Great Nebula in Orion  ·  M 42  ·  M 43  ·  NGC 1973  ·  NGC 1975  ·  NGC 1976  ·  NGC 1977  ·  NGC 1980  ·  NGC 1981  ·  NGC 1982  ·  The star 42Ori  ·  The star 45Ori  ·  The star θ1Ori  ·  The star θ2Ori  ·  The star ιOri
Messier 42 - captured by ROSETTA 260 million km away from earth!, Andreas Dietz
Messier 42 - captured by ROSETTA 260 million km away from earth!
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Messier 42 - captured by ROSETTA 260 million km away from earth!

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Must be fun to work at ESA and to wait for arrival of the space probe at the target comet 67P: In the previously fully released mission archive of the ROSETTA project I stumbled upon a few long-time exposures of Messier 42 taken with the NAVCAM camera module. They were taken three months before the Mars Swing-By in Feb 2007. At an estimated speed of 18.000km/h the distance to earth must have been 260 million kilometers! You know what that means? No natural or artificial light pollution at all! Bortle scale << 1!

In the meantime it has become a reflex for me to stack such an image set. So I couldn't resist to download them and to process them. The frames had been captured at full aperture of 70mm without attenuation filter. Unfortunately I couldn't find any valid dark frames, so I had to deal with a lot of hot pixels,...

Image credit: EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY-ESAC (Copyright)

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Messier 42 - captured by ROSETTA 260 million km away from earth!, Andreas Dietz

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