Click on Image to switch to Annotation View.
Orion and Friends
Cradled in cosmic dust and glowing hydrogen, stellar nurseries in Orion the Hunter, lie at the edge of a giant molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning nearly 25 degrees, this breath-taking vista stretches across the well-known constellation from head to toe (left to right).
The Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region, is right of center. To its left are the Horsehead Nebula, M78, and Orion's belt stars. Switching to Annotated View and you will also find descriptions of a red giant Betelgeuse at the hunter's shoulder, bright blue Rigel at his foot, and the glowing Lambda Orionis (Meissa) nebula at the far left, near Orion's head.
Of course, the Orion Nebula and bright stars are easy to see with the unaided eye, but dust clouds and emission from the extensive interstellar gas in this nebula-rich complex, are too faint and much harder to record. In this image also clearly visible pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and the arc of the giant Barnard's Loop.
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Alright, this image probably shouldn't have been seeing the light and have dedicated page on the website, because that image is certainly is the worst of all of my creations. It's combination of bit of everything, low amount of frames, just 8 of them, no dithering, bad seeing and transparency, hot weather, no flats, low amount of darks and bias frames...
So why it's here anyway? Well, putting aside that this image contain some beautiful objects, this image will represent a time mark for me. A mark for the new beginning, where from now on, things would be done differently.
As every photographer of any kind, you look for perfection and you always progress in your work. Every image that you work on, move you forward bit by bit, photon by photon. Leaning on my previous works I always know what I will do next and what I will do differently to make it better.
Some things to mention for example , is to Dither, that gives tremendous impact on fighting noise when integrating (stacking), do better and proper dark frames to make your image clear of thermal noise, no less important a proper Flat frames to have a flat illumination on your final image and correction for PRNU. And of course, important no less, is to try and take good amount of sub frames , as much as possible, to push back background noise and improve SNR of the image.
Did I mention better glass, better sensor? :-) The list is go on and on. Anyways, that image is also the last produced with Photoshop/DSS combination, as I moved to work solely with PixInsight.
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Technical Info:
Optics : Tamron 17-50mm XR Di-II LD SP @ 50mm @ F5.6
Camera : Canon T3i (600D) Baader Mod
Mount : NEQ-6 Pro (Self Hypertuned)
Guiding: Orion SSAG + Stellarvue F50m2 + Barlow x2 (400mm)
Acquisition : BackyardEOS 2.0.4
Exposure : 8 x 600 sec @ ISO800 - 1 Hour 40 Minutes Total
Stacking : DSS
Processing : Photoshop
