Jewels in the Dust - Orion Nebula and Running Man Nebula
by Adam Pender
Title
Jewels in the Dust - Orion Nebula and Running Man Nebula
Artist
Adam Pender
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
The Orion Nebula is approximately 1344 light years away, and is visible to the naked eye as the middle "star"in Orion's sword, just south of Orion's belt. The nebula is approximately 24 light years across, and has a mass of roughly 2000x that of the sun. It is a "star factory" where new stars are forming as the dust and gas coalesce.
I took this image from my backyard, with my regular camera and telephoto lens. This has been a long project to gather enough data to show the dark dust around the bright nebula (I love seeing the dim details like dark dust lanes, which takes a ton of exposure to reveal). This is a stack of approximately 10 hours of total exposure, using a Canon R5 at ISO400 to shoot hundreds of 60 and 120 second exposures through an EF 100-400 lens at f/5.6 over 4 moonless nights in November and December.
The subexposures were calibrated with flat, dark, and bias frames and stacked and processed in Astro Pixel Processor, with further processing in Photoshop. All told, this one image has close to 40 hours of capture, processing, and editing time behind it. (Stacking alone took over 13 hours, and I threw away hundreds of less than ideal sub exposures to get the best sharpness possible.)
The camera was mounted on a simple and low cost camera tracker mount to enable long exposures (a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer) with a small auto guiding scope and camera.
Uploaded
June 27th, 2021
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