Imperfect Yet Interesting – Dusty Messier 42 Orion Nebula

This is a bit of a “might as well try it” moment. The night was waning, cold, and still. Still well before dawn, but the end of a night of imaging at the dark sky site. Orion was just above the horizon to the east, so I though I might as well get some more images while I put away the other rigs. I slewed, set the camera for 30-sec exposures at at gain of 100, and left it alone while the sky grew lighter.

It is not a perfect image. The morning was cool, and the scopes was out of focus just a bit. The collimation of the Hyperstar was also a little off. But a Bortle 2 sky without any filters with an 11" f1.9 instrument makes for very fast imaging of objects compared to the longer exposures needed by various light pollution and narrowband filters.

Even after that, the dusty bands around the Great Orion Nebula are easily visible from rural settings in ways that are not when imaging from light-polluted urban and suburban skies.

Total integration: 30m

Integration per filter: – No filter: 30m (60 × 30") (Bortle 2 skies)

Equipment:

– Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 11"

– Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro

– Mount: iOptron CEM60EC

– Accessory: Starizona HyperStar 11 v4 (HS4-C11)

– Software: Adobe Photoshop, Aries Productions Astro Pixel Processor (APP)

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