Hi everyone,
I’m sharing with you today probably the most famous and photographed target of each winter: the Great Orion Nebula M42.
This project exists because we needed to find a target once the first target of the evening (also being processed) was no longer visible, while keeping the same camera orientation.
At first, it was just for fun, but since the first project lasted so long, I was able to acquire a lot of H-Alpha signal, and then the chance to photograph Orion in color came along.
So, this project quickly took an interesting scale…
The acquisition of the H-Alpha signal started in December 2022 and will be realized on 5 sessions to have a total of 260x300s and 150x10s, that is to say almost 22h. All these 5 sessions were done from my home, in Meurthe-et-Moselle, under Bortle 5 SQM 20.35 sky
I used the Optolong L-Ultimate filter for this signal, keeping only the Red layer.
For the RGB on the other hand, I was able to take advantage of a favorable shooting window mid-February 2023 on 3 consecutive nights. My friend Christophe Vergnes, living under a better sky than me (Bortle 4 SQM21), offered to install my setup at his place and manage it to get a quality RGB signal.
The great class.
I accepted and thanks to his kindness, we have after sorting 300x180s and 200x5s, a little more than 15h.
This being my last project with the Taka FSQ85EDX and ZWO2400MC setup before moving on to the mono camera, I wanted to conclude this chapter by including my two friends Yann Sty and Christophe in the photo processing.
Equipment:
– Takahashi FSQ 85 EDX
– ZWO Astronomy Cameras 2400MC
– Optolong Astronomy Filter L-Ultimate
– SkyWatcher EQ6 R Pro mount
– Asiair +
The mixture of our 3 knowledge allowed us to offer you this version of M42, a mixture of natural colors with a red hydrogen Alpha signal, giving a 3D impression and movement to the image.
You can find the image in high definition and details here :
https://www.astrobin.com/yoq5vg/
Clear skies to all !
Nico