Messier M42 - NGC1976 - Orion Nebula & NGC1977 Running Man Nebula - 30/10/2013 (Processed stack)

The 'Great Orion Nebula', M42 or NGC 1976, is located in the sword of Orion and is one of the brightest nebula in the sky, and perhaps the best known. It is a young star formation region with very hot high-UV stars ionising and 'lighting' the nebula.The brightness of these young stars make this an astrophotography challenge as the central regions are very bright in comparison to the tenous outer nebula and over exposure becomes a problem. High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques must be used to produce an image with a 'flattened' brightness range, more akin to the way the human eye perceives a wide range of brightness - not attempted here.

To the northeast (left as shown) of the Orion Nebula is the 'Running Man Nebula', NGC 1977, a blue reflection nebula, caused by reflected light on a dark non-ionised region of nebulosity.The silhoutte of the running man is much better seen here than my image of two nights earlier.

This was the first using a newly acquired Tele Vue 0.8X Reducer/Flattener. I was disappointed by that amount of vignetting that will needs flats to assist with, however very pleased by flatness of the image to the corners i this un-cropped version.

DeepSkyStacker 3.3.3b51 Stacked 75% of 18 Images ISO 800 60 Sec, 45 DARK @ 120Sec, 75 BIAS, 0 FLATS, Post-processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5

Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Tele Vue 0.8x Reducer/Flattener, Hutech IDAS LPS-P2 filter, Canon 40D DSLR field 132' x 199' , Ambient 20C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. Backyard EOS 2.09 for Image acquisition. Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. Guidescope - Orion ShortTube 80 with Starlight Xpress SuperSTar (Mono) CCD Auto Guider and Stark Labs PHD auto guiding software.

messierm42 orion nebulangcngc1976 m42 orion nebulangc1977 running man nebulagalactic nebula

From 2013 Where to next?