Orion Nebula

(Also known as: M42 & NGC 1976)

A year on from when I started this hobby I’ve returned to one of my first targets - M42, The Orion Nebula & Sh2-279, The Running Man Nebula.

The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest deep sky objects and can be seen with a pair of binoculars. The Nebula makes up the middle star of the dagger in the constellation of Orion. The Orion Nebula is approximately 1344 ly from Earth. The Running Man Nebula is a touch further away at 1500 ly.

This image was captured over three nights (1st, 4th & 8th January 2019) and is made up of 68 x 2 min Red, 67 x 2 min Green & 65 x 2 min Blue sub exposures; total exposure time was 6hrs 34 minutes. I shot 98 frames of each colour, but the rest were discarded due to clouds, planes, satellites, next doors TV aerial and my garden fence getting in the way.

Image was processed using Pixinsight to calibrate each frame, stack each channel, combine to RGB, extract luminance channel, deconvolute and sharpen, denoise, reduce star sizes slightly, recombine, adjust exposure to recover detail in the core and eventually export the final image!