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The Great Orion Nebula
The Great Orion Nebula
As the name suggests, it is an iconic nebula in the Orion constellation and it's visible in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, being close to the celestial equator at -5 degrees declination.
Listed as M42 in Messier's catalogue, it seems the brightest nebula to us on Earth with an apparent magnitude of 4 and it's easily visible to the naked eye, identified as Orion's sword.
It is also the closest star nursery to us, at about 1500 light years away, covering an area on the sky a little larger than the full Moon.
At the nebula's center, 4 stars are forming a pattern called the Trapezium, stars which are commonly watched to assess the optical performance of a telescope. This area is so bright that I needed to shoot 2s exposures in order to avoid saturating the sensors.
A bit to the North (left in the image) a smaller nebula around a single star is M43, or De Mairan's nebula.
Moving even more to the North, another well known nebula is the Running Man nebula.
The nebulosity in this area is caused both by light emitted by ionized gases (red is mostly hydrogen and blue/green/teal is mostly oxygen) as light reflected from stars on dust particles. The darker rims are denser areas of dust blocking the light coming from behind.
For this image I shot more than 9h, both from the backyard and traveling to dark sites to really catch the faint signal without the light pollution's noise in the way.
The Great Orion Nebula
The Great Orion Nebula
As the name suggests, it is an iconic nebula in the Orion constellation and it's visible in both Northern and Southern hemispheres, being close to the celestial equator at -5 degrees declination.
Listed as M42 in Messier's catalogue, it seems the brightest nebula to us on Earth with an apparent magnitude of 4 and it's easily visible to the naked eye, identified as Orion's sword.
It is also the closest star nursery to us, at about 1500 light years away, covering an area on the sky a little larger than the full Moon.
At the nebula's center, 4 stars are forming a pattern called the Trapezium, stars which are commonly watched to assess the optical performance of a telescope. This area is so bright that I needed to shoot 2s exposures in order to avoid saturating the sensors.
A bit to the North (left in the image) a smaller nebula around a single star is M43, or De Mairan's nebula.
Moving even more to the North, another well known nebula is the Running Man nebula.
The nebulosity in this area is caused both by light emitted by ionized gases (red is mostly hydrogen and blue/green/teal is mostly oxygen) as light reflected from stars on dust particles. The darker rims are denser areas of dust blocking the light coming from behind.
For this image I shot more than 9h, both from the backyard and traveling to dark sites to really catch the faint signal without the light pollution's noise in the way.