M42 Orion Nebula #16 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: 41 the01 Ori · 42 c Ori · 43 the02 Ori · 44 iot Ori · 45 Ori · De Mairan's nebula · Great Orion Nebula · Hatysa · Lower Sword · M 42 · M 43 · Mairan's Nebula · NGC 1976 · NGC 1977 · NGC 1980 · NGC 1982 · Orion Nebula · Sh2-279 · Sh2-281 · The star 42Ori · The star 45Ori · The star θ1Ori · The star θ2Ori · The star ιOri · VdB42 · the Running Man Nebula

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M42 Orion Nebula #16

Powered byPixInsight

M42 Orion Nebula #16

When I was camping out at the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society's dark sky site, I nabbed a little bit of data on the M42 region at the tail end of the night. It was really more for fun, since I saw that Orion was up and couldn't resist, but it came out awesome! I *love* getting dark nebulae in my images, and I got quite a bit here.

M42 is a very bright nebula, easily visible even to the naked eye in semi-light-polluted skies. The central core is very easy to blow out in exposures long enough to get the much-dimmer outer regions, so I took a few 1-minute exposures as well to help with the core (although that was still too long!). I used the HDRComposition and HDRMultiscaleTransform tools in PixInsight to unite the two images and get as much dynamic range as I could eke out.

Located at the tip of Orion's imaginary sword, M42 lies about 1,344 lightyears away from us, and is about 24 lightyears across. Seen visually in the telescope, I always imagine either a flower or a pair of cupped hands. The colors in the nebula are a result of energized glowing hydrogen gas (the red) and blue starlight reflected in in the gas and dust, as well as blue-green glowing oxygen gas. The dark clouds are light-absorbing molecular dust.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3980682
PixInsight job	XUI8MXJHF05GC06TPTNHAV2ELSH1RBOD
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	05h35m22s.26
RA (top/left)	05h31m17s.32
RA (top/right)	05h39m32s.98
RA (bottom/right)	05h39m27s.85
RA (bottom/left)	05h31m12s.30

Dec (center)	-05°27′09″.4
Dec (top/left)	-06°09′21″.2
Dec (top/right)	-06°07′09″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	-04°45′13″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	-04°46′59″.3

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M42 Orion Nebula #16

M42 Orion Nebula #16

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M42 Orion Nebula #16

M42 Orion Nebula #16

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