December 27, 2021

Great Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula (M42, NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula located within the Orion constellation. It’s so bright that it can be seen with the naked eye, appearing as a fuzzy “star” in the center of Orion’s sword. The Orion Nebula is the closest star formation nebula, about 1344 light years away from planet Earth. The nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across.

I imaged the Great Orion Nebula last night. It was one of those nights where things didn’t go well. Guiding wasn’t too good but the telescope’s short focal length and slightly under-sampled pixel size hides it. When processing the images this morning, I found that something was wrong with the field flatness. Images taken after the meridian flip had misaligned stars in the upper left and lower right corners. As a result, I had to crop out a lot of the image.

I was very surprised at how well I was able to capture the faint hydrogen alpha regions surround the Orion Nebula. I could really use a lot more exposure time to improve the signal in that area. But with the poor field flatness, I would either have to continue imaging with poor settings and a cropped final result, or fix the flatness and start over, throwing out the entire night of data.

RA: 05h35m23s.3
DEC: -05°16′44″