2016 March

M42 – Orion Nebula in Mono

Something simple for a change… the Orion Nebula, M42, and its neighbourhood in H-alpha light. This mono image results from an HDRComposition of stacked frames with three different exposures to cover the large dynamic range of this target. Exposure: H, 16x60sec + 14x300sec + 8x900sec Date: 2016-1-17 Setup: Takahashi FSQ106 EDXIII with QSI 683WSG-8 Site: […]

EGB6 – An Ancient Planetary Nebula

This in an incredibly faint object – EGB 6 – discovered by Ellis, Grayson, and Bond in 1984 in a visual search through prints from the Palomar Sky Survey. Here is a link to their original paper. EGB 6 is an old and hence large planetary nebula with extremely low surface brightness. The image is […]

M78 – Reflection Nebula in Orion

M78 is sometimes forgotten reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion and part of the Orion molecular cloud complex. It includes NGC 2064, NGC 2067 and NGC 2071 and other nebulae. This image is an LRGB composite with more than 15 hours of data taken at Deep Sky West. Again my first attempt at processing […]

Horsehead and Flame Nebula

A famous scenery, the Horsehead Nebula (B33), the Flame Nebula (NGC2024), and the blue supergiant star Alnitak the east-most star in the Belt of Orion surrounded by more subtle nebulosity. This is an LRGB composite image using a total of around 8 hours of data taken at the Deep Sky West observatory. The processing was […]