Description:
We say farewell to the Orion constellation as it sinks ever lower in the west until its reappearance next winter. I decided to reprocess some data that I collected of the incredible Orion Nebula, cataloged as Messier 42. This nebula is probably the most well known of all nebulae due to its proximity and brightness. You can clearly see it in Orion's sword below the three bright belt stars. It is easily visible with the naked eye on a clear night because it is only 1350 light years from Earth and quite large at 24 light years across. M42 is our closest region of massive star formation.
It gets its amazing colors from ionized hydrogen (red) and doubly ionized oxygen (blue-green). The nebula contains a cluster of bright, young stars at its center called the Trapezium. My goal with this reprocess was to bring out the faint nebulosity in the outskirts, which you rarely see in images of M42. The pinkish blob to the upper left of M42 is actually a separate nebula called De Mairan's Nebula or M43. There is a triple star system at its center, the brightest of which puts out 26,000 times the light of our sun.
I made this image from 31 60-second ISO 3200 exposures using my trusty Canon 6D DSLR (no filters) at 1630mm focal length (0.7X reducer). I calibrated the subs with 10 dark, 20 flat, and 20 bias frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor and post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins.
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