This region of space never disappoints. All the gas and dust that make up the nebulae are part of the Orion Molecular cloud located in the Constellation of Orion. The big three are the Orion Nebula (M42) at ~1344 light-years away, the Horsehead Nebula (B33) at ~1375 light-years away, and finally the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024 & Sh2-277) at ~1350 light-years distance. All three are impressive emission nebulae in their own right but there is a lot of faint secondary gas and dust between the nebulae which is one of the goals for this image.

This is the second time I imaged this with Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM lens only this time I wanted to try something different from last year's traditional HaRGB image so I went with all narrowband. Rather than doing the normal SHO blend I went to an OHS blend that was described by Antoine & Dalia Grelin (Galactic Hunter) when they did this last year. Their image was fantastic and I wanted to see if I could get a decent image of it as well using their method. I am very pleased with the results and I think this blend allowed for more detail to be visible. The swirly gas stringers scattered throughout this field are breathtaking. I especially like the ones above the B33 and the ones south of M42. There is much more fine detail in each nebula than there is in any of my previous attempts. Most times I would not say zoom in but this one holds up even when zoomed in a bit.

In order to do this I connected a ZWO EFW (1.25") to the camera lens using the low profile ZWO adaptor and attached it to my Sirius Mount located in the astronomy shed. In addition, rather than using the internal lens aperture to control the f-stop, I used stepdown rings in order to obtain the focal ratio of f/4. The reason for doing this is that the star shapes come out much better and it eliminates the eight-sided star spikes from the lenses aperture control.


Dates: 2-14-22, 2-15, 2-18, 2-20, 2-21, 2-25, 2-26, 2-27, 2-28, 3-3, 3-4      

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