M42 - The Great Orion Nebula (Timothy Martin)

M42 - The Great Orion Nebula

This is M42, the Great Orion Nebula and its close companion, M43, De Mairan’s Nebula (on the far left). At 1,344 light years away, it’s easily visible with the naked eye as a bright blob in Orion’s Sword (just below Orion’s Belt). And this thing is a star factory!

The most famous of the stars to come from that factory are the four main stars of the Trapezium, creatively dubbed A, B, C, and D. They are visible in this picture but hard to pick out because of the brightness of the emission nebula’s central region. Ironically, they are very prevalent when viewing the nebula visually through an eyepiece because the frequencies of bright blue light they give off are more compatible with our eyes than the rest of the nebula, which appears to be a cloudy gray to our eyes.

But put a camera on it, and all sorts of gorgeous colors and textures come through. We shot this at the full 2800mm focal length of the C11. So we couldn’t get the whole thing in the frame—but I think we compensated for that by capturing a great deal of detail.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: I've reprocessed this image at least fortyleventy times and probably spent 100 hours trying to get satisfied with an hour's worth of data I captured three years ago when I didn't know a reducer from a turbo encabulator. But this data is precious to me because it was the first time I was ever able to see anything meaningful besides a planet live through my telescope. The stars are a bit wonky, and the framing is atrocious, but I still like this image because of all that. Plus, as we say in poker, now I'm pot committed. (There's another poker saying that might apply here: "If you don't know who the donkey is at your table, it's you.")

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7092660
PixInsight job	3B4RI08SW64URTCXTP5KDFCW5N32D0NL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h34m49s.851
RA (top/left)	05h35m27s.879
RA (top/right)	05h33m05s.322
RA (bottom/right)	05h34m11s.817
RA (bottom/left)	05h36m34s.513

Dec (center)	-05°26′08″.62
Dec (top/left)	-05°01′53″.63
Dec (top/right)	-05°25′28″.31
Dec (bottom/right)	-05°50′24″.35
Dec (bottom/left)	-05°26′47″.69

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