The Orion Nebula

Added 1661852012 by Heavenly Bodies Studio.

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The image is of the Orion Nebula and adjacent Running Man Nebula, imaged by myself from my home in the UK. The Orion Nebula, having official designation M42, is an emission nebula in the Orion constellation, about 1340 light years distant and about 24 light years across. This is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth and is visible to the naked eye in areas with reasonably low light pollution, appearing as the middle "star" in Orion's sword.

To capture the faint details of the nebula requires a telescope with specialised camera, equatorial mount to track the rotation of the earth and a separate guiding camera to accurately control the pointing of the telescope during the long exposures required to capture the details of the nebula. Many of these long-exposure images are stacked to increase the signal to noise ratio and reveal the colour and detail. Because this nebula has areas of intense brightness and areas of faint nebulosity, high dynamic range techniques are required to combine different length exposures, revealing the inner core stars (the Trapezium Cluster) and faint dust clouds. This image was created using 160 exposures of varying length for a total of just under 3 hours of exposure. The resulting high-resolution image is 25Mpixels.

The imaging equipment used is a Skywatcher Esprit 100ED Pro Telescope, a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro astro-camera, cooled to -20C on a Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount.