The is the Great Nebula in Orion, which I took in the early morning hours of December 31, 2013, by remotely controlling a telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia (where it was close to 11:00 PM). The nebula, which is about 24 light years across, is located approximately 1350 light years from earth. It is basically a giant cloud of dust and gas. In some parts of the nebula, the dust and gas are coalescing to form new stars. The Orion Nebula is the closest region of active star formation to the earth. Orion is probably the most recognizable of constellations with three stars in a line representing his belt and another group of three stars representing his sword. The M42 nebula is located at the center of the sword and is visible to the naked eye as a small fuzzy patch when viewed from a location with a dark sky.
The telescope in Australia is part of the iTelescope system (
www.itelescope.net). This system comprises three (soon to be four) observatories, located in New Mexico, Spain, Australia, and soon, California. The telescopes are operated remotely using a web browser. There are several telescopes with different characteristics located at each observatory. The telescope used in this image is a Takahashi Sky90 refractor with an SBIG ST2000XMC color camera. I downloaded the image and processed it using the Images Plus Image Processing software. Final tweaks were made in Photoshop.
Comments