Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Orion (Ori)  ·  Contains:  Extremely wide field
Orion Complex, bbright
Orion Complex
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Orion Complex

Orion Complex, bbright
Orion Complex
Powered byPixInsight

Orion Complex

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Description

My first successful astro mosaic! It's a total of 380 minutes of imagery, 11 different panels, so panel integrations average 34 minutes. The Orion, Running Man, Horsehead, and Flame Nebulae area has the most imagery behind it, as well as the Witch Head Nebula.

Imagery was acquired in 2019 and 2020 on 9 different nights from the same location under rural skies (Bortle 3/4). All subs were taken with my Fuji X-T10 and Samyang 135 mm on the iOptron SkyTracker Pro. Each sub is 60 seconds, taken at ISO 1600 with the Samyang 135mm open to f2.

I integrated individual panels using DeepSkyStacker, and used the 'remove light pollution' tool of Astro Pixel Processor to flatten integrations, which had substantial vignetting from being shot at f2. These flattened panels were then mosaiced with Astro Pixel Processor using the process outlined here: www.astropixelprocessor.com/part-3-register-normalize-int.... Curves adjustment, star reduction, and color tweaking were then done with GIMP. This image is downscaled 50%.

It's not a perfect process and the data has issues, but I'm happy with the result. It was fun to explore the less-imaged nebulosity between the Orion and the Witch Head Nebulae, and around Saiph.

I'm sure I'll keep tinkering with this, and I still plan to shoot the entirety of Orion this winter, but this is a nice mosaic in and of itself, so I wanted to post it.

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Orion Complex, bbright