Great Orion Nebula

[glsammy]

Your shots are very welcome, load as many as you like!

[Lancashire Lad]

Originally Posted by nytecam

....Hope these shots of interest....

Most definitely.
Interesting, intreaguing, and in a way, quite beautiful. (And I dare say, not the easiest of subjects to get anything like a good photograph of).

Are these long time exposures? or perhaps created by image stacking? - I'm very curious regards the technique used. (Not sure if your original comment "....in 3m exposure" meant a 3 minute exposure).

Best regards
Mike.

[pressld2]

Originally Posted by Lancashire Lad

(Not sure if your original comment "....in 3m exposure" meant a 3 minute exposure)

Or a 3 month one!

Seriously, I'm with Mike and I'd love to know more about how these images are captured - technique and equipment. They are very beautiful.

Dave P.

[Meta menardi]

I think they are great photos, and all the info is very interesting. Any more details would interest me.

[Vectisbirder]

It's a gorgeous region of the sky, one of my favourite winter observing areas. Through binoculars or a rich-field scope it's a fantastic sight. Even my non-astronomy-interested sister liked M42 when I showed it to her through my 12-inch!

[nytecam]

Thanks again for your interest and support Here's a couple of shots of the Great Andromeda Galaxy [M31] - our home Milky Way galaxy's twin but some 2 million light-years distant [quite close on a cosmic scale]

The close-up of the core is via my 30cm Meade LX200 scope whilst the full galaxy is a mosaic via my tiny Meade ETX-70 scope piggybacked on the main telescope. Two satellite galaxies are in M31 full pic - so our local group of galaxies has maybe two dozen members all up - mostly faint dwarf galaxies.



I use Starlight Xpress CCD cameras [Goggle for info] - they're expensive but good value over a decade of continual use and ultra sensitive - maybe x5 -x10 moreso than popular colour DSLRs so my total exposures are short - typically 1min - 5min duration but broken down into 10s-30s 'sub' exposures.

These subs are automatically stacked, via the camera software, into the final image. Sometime several final images are manually stacked together to go deeper! A quick contrast stetch [to remove my horendous light-pollution in SW London suburbs] then title and post. The frame exposure usually in the top line with north point [always up!] and scale of image included. Hope that explains

[Lancashire Lad]

More stunning images - and thanks for the explanation nytecam.

I've just had a look at the Starlight Xpress website, and there are some amazing photo's on there as well.

Regards
Mike.