Orion and the Running Man Nebulae (M 42 and NGC 1977)

The famous region of the Orion constellation, the magnificent M42 region, with M43 De Mairam’s nebula and of course NGC 1977, the Running Man nebula.

Although imaging for many years, this was my first attempt at imaging this famous region, since it appears for less than 1 hour between two rows of houses. This year, I decided to capture a few frames over the course of 4 nights just close to the meridian from a Bortle 7 zone in broadband light using a fast mirror scope. In broadband light with a relative deep exposure we see the dust regions and also the Ha emission from ionized hydrogen within the dust that mix to give various tones of light and dark molecular cloud regions, and lots of emission nebulosity around the core, which shows the stars but deliberately kept bright since it is a very bright region.

Autore: Colm O'Dwyer