Orion Nebula

smr · 23 Feb 2018 at 19:17

Hi,

Last night, after months of studying Astrophotography and specifically Deep Sky Object (DSO) Photography I took my first photograph of Messier 42, also known as the Orion Nebula. It is 1,344 light years from Earth and is estimated to be 24 light years across. An estimated 1,000 stars are being born here. You can also see the Running Man on the left of the image. It's a total of 50 minutes worth of exposure time and took 8 hours to process.

Orion Nebula by Joel Spencer, on Flickr

Steve M · 23 Feb 2018 at 19:31

Impressive.

smr · 23 Feb 2018 at 20:24

Steve M said:
Impressive.

Thanks Steve. It's amazing to think that light travels at 180,000 miles per second too...

Drollic · 24 Feb 2018 at 09:52

Love some of this stuff but simply haven't got the time for it currently.

And · 24 Feb 2018 at 11:28

Excellent image Joel. Out of interest, what kit did you use and how many exposures?

smr · 25 Feb 2018 at 23:15

Thanks all.

The image was taken with my unmodded Canon 80D, 55-250 STM lens at 250mm unguided on a Star Adventurer and Manfrotto CXPro055 Tripod, intervalometer and processed using Deep Sky Stacker and then Photoshop CS6. There was around 53 minutes of light frames, no darks, bias or flats. It took me around 8 hours to process in Photoshop, DSS didn't take too long to stack. It was setup in my garden and I was outside some of the time checking some of the frames whilst also hopping in to my conservatory.

Marzipanogram · 26 Feb 2018 at 15:06

Excellent work

I don't know if I'm more impressive by the photo or hearing that Ps ran for 8 hours without crashing

Irish_Tom · 2 Mar 2018 at 14:25

This is really cool, nice one.