Messier 42 (Orion Nebula), NGC 1977 (Running Man), etc.

OTA: FSQ 106

Camera: QSI683wsg-8

Observatory: Deep Sky West

EXPOSURES:

Red: 8x15” 8x60” 16x600”

Blue: 8x15” 8x60” 32x600”

Green: 8x15” 8x60” 16x600”

Lum: 15x15” 16x60” 16x600”

Hydrogen: 9 x 60” 14x900”

Total exposure ~20 hours

Image Width: ~2 deg

Processed by Alex Woronow (2019) using PixInsight, Skylum, Topaz

The Great Nebula in Orion lies in the sword on the belt of the constellation of Orion, a prominent constellation of winter-time, night-sky. The naked eye can just sense this nebula, at magnitude +4.0, on a modestly dark night. The nebula lies only 1,340 light-years away, and boasts being the most photographed and an intensely studied nebula by earthly astronomers, professional and amateur alike.

In fact, M 42 was the first deep sky object every photographed in the year was 1800 by the famous Professor Henry Draper. He used an 11” refractor and a 51 minute exposure to capture that image.

By the way, Draper was also the first to photography the moon through a telescope, in 1840.



M 42 has contributed greatly to our understanding of star and planet formation. The bright cluster of very young stars (and many Herbig Haro objects) known as the Trapezium appears as the white patch at the left of the main nebula, in my image. The nebula appears bubble-like with an obvious outer ring and a hollowed-out interior. The Trapezium’s cluster with it large, young stars, emit intense ultra-violet radiation and strong stellar winds that have pushes away the gas and dust, thereby forming the bubble.



My rendering of M 42 is a “high-dyanmic-range” composition, meaning that short exposures capture the brightest parts of the nebula and blended with longer exposures of the fainter regions. This technique allows capturing bright areas that would otherwise be saturated and featureless in long exposures and combining them with faint areas that would not be revealed in short exposures. The astro-image-processing program, PixInsight, provided this blending capability as well as most of the basic and specialized image processing. Unique (at this time), to my astro-image processing is the use of “Deep Learning” artificial-intelligence programs to denoise, sharpen, and tone the image. The opportunities that exist today to enhance images with this AI technology are astounding...and the field is but 6 years old!

Data generously provided by Lloyd Smith, Deep Sky West!