M78 is a reflection nebula enshrouded in light-absorbing dust in the constellation Orion. It's not far from the much flashier M42, the Great Nebula of Orion. M78 is the chiller cousin.
It's part of the large Orion B molecular cloud complex, which is one of the two complexes that make up all the rich interstellar dust that suffuses Orion. The Orion cloud complex is one of the most active star-forming regions in the galaxy. Orion B is about 1,370 lightyears from us and has a total mass of material 100,000 times the mass of the Sun!
Reflection nebulae, and particularly dark nebulae, are very challenging to image well under light pollution. I wanted to see how the Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter would perform, which is sort of part wide-band light pollution filter and part narrowband filter. It has broad bandpasses (~25-35nm) around the Ha, SII, OIII, and NII lines, as well as ~25nm up in the blue (425-450nm). The idea is to cut a lot of light pollution, but still be decent for galaxies and reflection nebulae. I have to say, it did a great job capturing the blue, and the hydrogen is definitely present (wish I'd used this on a wider field-of-view to get more of Barnard's Loop). This image looked a bit of a mess, as I expected, when it came out of stacking and even after DynamicBackgroundExtraction, but as in the
before-and-after I posted on Facebook, GraXpert did an excellent job killing the remaining gradients, and NoiseXterminator made quick work of the worst of the noise. This is my best image of it so far -- although now I want to go back and re-process some of the others!
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