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 (
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