Barnard's Loop and Part of Orion Molecular Cloud Complex - February 2024
Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33/IC 434 ), Running Man Nebula (Sh2-279), Orion Nebula (M 42) & Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118)

My first attempt at using a camera lens (rather than a telescope) for astrophotography, a Canon 'Nifty Fifty' 50mm, with a fast f/1.8 focal ratio (f/r). It took a few clear nights in January to get the aperture and exposure time figured out, but got it dialed in for the next new moon...down to f/5.6 to get decent star shapes.
Between bad initial framing, occasional high clouds and overall warm temperatures, I had to whittle the amount of individual frames down from an initial count of 1,376 to stacking a total of 702 sub-frames that were acceptable...9 minutes short of 6 hours of total exposure time. I'm not totally thrilled with the final result, as there was a lot of noise mixed in with this data, and my skills with the new editing software have a ways to go...

Planning for this began last summer (2023), with the idea that we would have cold temperatures being smack in the middle of winter in southern Ontario. This would allow me to use an un-cooled DLSR (trusty old un-modded Canon T3i) without too much concern about thermal noise in the images. Unfortunately, our evening temperatures were around 10-12 °C above normal over the 3 nights of capturing this extremely wide-field target in early February 2024.

To make things REALLY interesting, my normal program for processing astro photos couldn't handle this vast amount of data; I was forced to learn a new editing program to get something out of this image. With a total of 702 30-second images, my computer also revealed a few weak points during processing that will need addressing to use the new and upcoming software upgrades, especially once the new ZW02600MM starts it's duties with huge sub-frames.

The journey is afoot...

Clear Skies