Central Orion

Hi all, The clouds unveiled a sparkling Orion last night, some of the best skies I've seen in some months, and I could'nt resist having a go at attempting to get a deep image of Orion's belt and Nebula.

Orion's belt itself is very bright, joined by the brilliant Flame Nebula NGC2024 and IC434 with the famous Horsehead Nebula B33 to the left. At upper left, two other deepsky objects can be seen, these are Barnard's loop, just seen in red, and M78. To the right of Rigel, bottom right, I have caught the outline of the blue reflection withhead nebula, IC2118.

Strangly, the camera has picked up a lot of blue to the right of the image. Finally, the famous Orion nebula M42 is easily seen, and is quite large in size ! along with starcluster NGC 1981, and the running man nebula NGC1977 above M42.

I'm very happy with this shot of such a great area !
Details: Canon 400D, 70mm 'L' lens at f4.5, ISO 800, stack of 11 four minute shots and 5 dark frames.

Keith..

Thats a fab image as usual Keith i took the same image aswell but it's not half as good ,mind you it was only 3 x 55 second .What software are you using to process?

Keith,

Thats a beautiful wide field detailed image. I can see all the other well known
targets as mentioned in your description.

Eamonn A

Thats a stunner Kieth!
The time you spend on each of those is really paying off.

Hi all, The clouds unveiled a sparkling Orion last night, some of the best skies I've seen in some months, and I could'nt resist having a go at attempting to get a deep image of Orion's belt and Nebula.
Strangly, the camera has picked up a lot of blue to the right of the image. Finally, the famous Orion nebula M42 is easily seen, and is quite large in size ! along with starcluster NGC 1981, and the running man nebula NGC1977 above M42. I'm very happy with this shot of such a great area !
Details: Canon 400D, 70mm 'L' lens at f4.5, ISO 800, stack of 11 four minute shots and 5 dark frames.Keith..

Brilliant image Keith! Just a thought about the blue colour. Would it be a light pollution gradient which affect wide field images more than narrow field ones? Ron Wodaski devotes an entire 24-page section of his book to removing Light Pollution Gradients using Photoshop.

Spectacular!! it certainly was a great sky while clear last night.