My favorite photo from the 2017 Connecticut Star Party. Clouds rolled in on the first night and I went to bed early, but woke up around 3am and peeked outside my tent to find crystal clear skies. Despite over 50 people camping with telescopes, I was the only one awake. With Orion rising high in the east, I immediately went after this winter gem.
The Orion Nebula is a massive star forming region about 1350 light years away from us, and 24 light years in diameter. This image was taken through a 4.5" apochromatic refractor and consists of eighteen 60 second frames stacked in Pixinsight, and another 49 frames at shorter 5 second exposures to tone down the bright central stars around the Trapezium. Pixinsight is terrific for bringing out the fine details, and I made further adjustments in Photoshop (curves, levels, color balance, and star reduction), plus a little noise reduction with Noise Ninja.
I know that non-aurora astrophotography doesn't score well here, but I like it. After a year and a half of effort, this is the first photo I've ever set as my computer desktop background.
Yay! After 13 years, I finally won a Free Study... and all it took was $4000 in new gear, 18 months of practice with insanely complicated processing software, and standing out in a field alone in the dark at 3am. Despite all my camera and Photoshop experience, I was incapable of producing this shot even a year ago. Outtakes from the Star Party are posted HERE.
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Simply fabulous. I understand the technical challenge of just getting the camera images for this.
The software and processing make it a terrific image.
I'm just guessing, that this was done with an 8" Celestron CAT.
Oh WOW! Congratulations, what a great image. I didn't realize you could photograph this without being in a planetarium or similar. Its one of my favorite nebulae (no, I know absolutely nothing about them, except that I love seeing pics of them :-)).
Running Man and the Great Orion Nebula
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