Since it
was really cold, I decided to give backyard astronomy a try. I only have view of a slice of the sky, but
the Orion Nebula was visible until around 11:15 PM before it slid behind the
roof of the apartment building. The
skyglow from the city is much brighter in at my apartment than at the state park, but since the Orion Nebula
is so bright (+4.00), it didn’t much matter, and this experiment worked out
much better than the Bode’s Galaxy images I tried to get last summer. I did both 20-second and 30-second images,
and discovered that my ratio of keeping vs discarding images is much higher
with 20-seconds, like 50% or more. The
background is brighter, but the image is sharper with the additional
images. It’s probably sharper because I
used ISO-1600 rather than 3200. This one
combines the 20 and 30 second sets.
M42 Orion Nebula, Nikon D3100 on my C8.
[I didn't record how many of the 20 and 30 second images were stacked.], ISO-1600
Imaging
from the front porch went well, but it’s just not dark enough to do much else
besides planets, the Moon, and Orion.
The Orion Nebula is truly something
else. It’s mind-blowingly
beautiful. I love the fact that the
colors are real – a part of me always
wondered if the colors in those beautiful Hubble images from NASA were real, or
added for effect, and now it’s clear to me that they are, indeed, real. (At least, most of the time – sometimes, IR
light is added to the image as well, and sometimes UV). The red is from hydrogen-alpha (Hα) emission,
and the blue is from oxygen (the OIII ions, I guess). Yup, they’re real!
[Much of the blue also comes from reflected starlight.]
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