Orion's Dusty Neighborhood (David McClain)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: Great Nebula in Orion · Horsehead nebula · IC 430 · IC 434 · M 42 · M 43 · NGC 1975 · NGC 1976 · NGC 1977 · NGC 1980 · NGC 1981 · NGC 1982 · NGC 1990 · NGC 1999 · NGC 2023 · NGC 2024 · NGC 2064 · Part of the constellation Orion (Ori) · The star 29Ori · The star 42Ori · The star Alnilam (εOri) · The star Alnitak (ζOri) · The star Mintaka (δOri) · The star ηOri · The star ιOri · The star σOri · The star υOri

Orion's Dusty Neighborhood, David McClain

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Orion's Dusty Neighborhood

This one took me a while to get right... Orion was dipping ever more into the light pollution to the south coming from Tucson, only about 5 miles away. All that light pollution, despite my LPR filter, caused the stacked image to exhibit a strong light dome. I thought something was terribly wrong with my calibration flats, but after several weeks of going over this data and others with the same flats, I had to conclude that the flats were really okay.

Proper stacking required ignoring the increasing dispersion in the base histogram and not scaling images according to background variance. Once I figured that out, I finally managed to get a decent flattened integrated image.

But when I saw all that brown-orange crud, I though surely something must have gunked up my lens during the exposures (frost? dew?), or passing clouds, or something awful like that.

But that orange stuff is really there. It is very fine dust, with grains about the size of our terrestrial oxygen and nitrogen molecules. And just like a smoky sunset, or a sunset viewed through distant volcanic ash, it turns the starlight orange as all the blue light gets scattered away.

Those orange cloudy regions have less than one photon per minute arriving in the pixels of my focal plane. (!!)

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	941202
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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