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Orion Nebula M42

The Great Orion Nebula is a favorite of anyone with a telescope.  It is easily found within the sword of the constellation Orion.   Even through binoculars, this object can be seen as a billowing cloud.  The view only gets better through a telescope.  Much of the detail within the Orion Nebula, seen in the bottom half of this image, can be seen with a small telescope.  Visually, only the color is missing.  The red color is best recorded photographically, and represents the emision spectra of hydrogen gas excited by the neighboring young hot stars.  A much larger cloud of denser matter surrounds this area.  The Orion Nebula is a spectacular stellar nursery, giving rise to many young suns. The upper object has been called the "Running Man Nebula."  Dark intersecting lanes of dust create the apparition of a man's arms spread wide as he runs towards our left.  The blue color represents a reflection nebula, with clouds of dust merely reflecting the light of nearby stars.  The image on the left was taken at the Hidden Lake Observatory.  I used an ST2000XM camera through a Takahashi Sky90 refractor and Takahashi reducer.  I combined 25 red, 20 green, and 22 blue 2-minute exposures, for a total imaging time of 2 hours 14 minutes. The image below was taken 4 years earlier from my light polluted backyard.  It is the combination of 20 red, 20 green, and 30 blue 30-second images, for a total imaging time of 35 minutes.  I used a 4 inch AP refractor with an ST10XME CCD camera.

Music - Colors of the Wind