A quick one-hour exposure can reveal loads of details when you're aiming at the zenith from a high altitude site combined with relatively dark skies!
Probably the most photographed region in the entire sky, but no one seems to get tired of it, as they should. Plenty of reflection and emission nebulosity take part of the "três marias", or "three-maries" as us brazilians tend to refer, tenderly, to the orion's belt. Taken in the same night of my previous image,
The Witch Head Nebula, during the only clear summer night I got from nov. 22 until feb. 23. A reasonably rainy season. But that night had perfect transparency, another factor that really helped me to endure this beautiful signal-to-noise ratio with such low exposure time. With proper noise reduction, the one explained
here, bringing that background nebulosity without damaging the image's overall quality was possible. As summer comes back this year, a mosaic with the nifty-fifty is on my plans for long, and hopefully I'll be able to work it out.
My favorite part on this image is definitely the subtle reflection nebula near Alnilam, from the arabic النظام, meaning the "arregement of pearls". I can only imagine how much our ancestors would have loved to know that behind such beautiful twine of pearls there were, withing them, loads of underlying ivory treasures.
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