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 as a full page website here: https://tinyurl.com/2mzfvybs

Dominating 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.com
Camera: 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

Orion Mosaic Dates of capture
2022-01-26
2022-01-27
2022-01-28
2022-01-22
2022-01-23
2022-01-29
2022-01-30

Integration
A1 61 x 2 min
A2 65 x 2 min
A3 67 x 2 min
A4 71 x 2 min
A5 60 x 2 min
A6 62 x 2 min
A7 56 x 2 min
A8 60 x 2 min
A9 70 x 2 min
A10 84 x 2 min
A11 73 x 2 min
A12 84 x 2 min

Total 1626 minutes 27.1 hours

M42
Dates of capture
2021-10-29
2021-10-17
2021-11-06

M42 Dates of Capture

Integration
LUM 45x120
RED 50x120
GREEN 47x120
BLUE 51x120
LUM 28x1
RED 28x1
GREEN 26x1
BLUE 21x1

Total 195 minutes 3.25 hours

IC434
Dates of capture
2020-12-24
2021-01-06
2021-01007
2021-01-09


Integration
LUM 43x120
RED 45x120
GREEN 40x120
BLUE 38x120

Total 166 minutes 2.76 hours

Total 33.1 hours