M42 The Great Orion Nebula

The Great Orion Nebula has always been a firm favourite to view visually or to image. I was lucky enough to view the trapezium through the clubs 20 reflector. A beautiful sight in a quality eyepiece. I also had some fun imaging it too. Not a very favorably placed object for my backyard with the fence and a number of electricity cables stretching across from  The South to the North East. So an imaging run consist of a lot of rejected frames with wires.

I created a starless image to process the nebula, looks quite nice

The we have the Running Man Nebula

M42 The Orion Nebula

A last look at the Great Orion Nebula for a few months. Unfortunately for me it disappears behind the front of the house about an hour past the meridian so a very limited window of capture now in March.

Anyway a short capture of 20 x 180 and 20 x 30 seconds images taken with the ASI294mc pro on the ED100 via the ASI AIR Pro.  Calibrated and stacked in Deep sky stacker and processed in Photoshop. I am always amazed how smooth the result is and even with a huge crop on the Trapezium the resulting image is incredibly clean. One confession to make though for the pixel peepers, the 4 stars of the Trapezium have been made round removing slight halos from processing.

First post for a long while, Last one of the year.

Due to illness this has been my first post for a few months now. It was great to go out to my observatory and dust off the cobwebs and roll back the roof. I am lucky in that once I have powered & set up approx 10 minutes I can then control all my imaging from the comfort of inside the house. No more endless hours in the cold. Through the 35 years or so I have been an astronomer I feel i have earned & done my time in the cold. I was surprised that everything was working well. I decided an easy target to get me back into the swing. Due to the moon's presence I limited the exposures to 5 minutes. A total of 2 hours 20 minutes has given me this result. I also took a number of 10 second exposures, so the final result was not to over expose the core. Taken through the William Optics GT81. No calibration frames used. Just processed in Photoshop. I hope to return with longer exposures to capture the outer shell of gas. Looking forward to posting pics of Comet Lovejoy too soon.