This is my first light image using the QHY367C on a Rokinon 135mm F2 lens captured from grandmesaobservatory.com

For focusing I used David Lane's "Reveal Focus Filter" which works just like a Bahtinov mask www.davelaneastrophotography.com/product/100mm-reveal-foc...

I love the wide field of this cam/lens combination, only 119 x 60 second exposures for a total integration time just under 2 hours



Image capture details

Terry Hancock downunderobservatory.com

Location: GrandMesaObservatory.com Whitewater, Colorado

Dates: December 10 2017

RGB 119 x 1 min

Camera: QHY367C

Gain 2850, Offset 76 with Dark Frames no Flat.

Optics: Rokinon 135mm F2 Telephoto Lens @ F4

EQ Mount: Paramount ME

Image Acquisition software Maxim DL5

Registered, Calibrated and Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker

Post Processed with Pixinsight and Photoshop CS6

Dominating the night sky from December through March, the ancient constellation Orion is one of the most famous star groups in the heavens. Five thousand years ago, the ancient Sumerians imagined this group of stars as their legendary hero Gilgamesh. The ancient Greeks associated these stars with a mighty hunter adorned with 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 Menelvagor, the “Swordsman of the Sky”.



Many of the brilliant blue-white stars that make the constellation Orion so striking were formed in the last 5 to 8 million years, which makes them quite young by astronomical standards. Some of these young stars are part of the “Gould Belt”, a tilted ring of bright stars nearly centered on our solar system. The belt may have formed when a large cloud of gas from outside the Milky Way smashed into the plane of our galaxy at a shallow angle and compressed clouds of interstellar gas and dust, triggering the formation of new stars.

Stars continue to form in and around Orion. The most prominent star-forming region in the constellation, and one of the brightest in the night sky, is the famous Orion Nebula. A favorite target of most stargazers, it’s visible as the fuzzy middle “star” in the Sword of Orion, just south of the three stars of Orion’s Belt. At a distance of 1,340 light years, this enormous, elegant, batwing-shaped nebula gives us a front-row view of star formation in real time.



Read more about the Orion Nebula in our e-book "The Armchair Astronomer" it's cheaper than a pint of Ale or a Gourmet Coffee cosmicpursuits.com/e-books/armchair-astronomer-volume-1-n...