A winter spectacle seen on an autumn predawn

ON this wide picture of the Great Orion Nebula complex, you’ll see the beautiful clouds of gas and dust reflecting and fluorescing the light from the bright blue stars at the centre. If you step back and take in the grand scene, all 10 square degrees of it, you will start to see among the bright blue stars, a few little orange stars. And then, towards the lower right, a few of the background Milky Way stars start to creep into shot. Fingers of opaque, black dust can just be made out streaming off to the right, by virtue of the incursions of stars visible behind it. All of which gives you a clue to the real size of this patch of interstellar material. I find it very odd how a vertical line of four different types of object have arranged themselves on the sky like this, for us to see (check out Messier 8). Not bad for a 2 minute exposure (18/09/10).

The Glorious Orion Nebula

This was an exercise in using a telescope that doesn't give sharp resolution stars, to generate an extra-sharp picture. The idea came to me at the telescope, while peering at the Orion Nebula. The secret is that it is a mosaic of 15 pictures. Each was a 15-second exposure taken at f/4.8 on the 20" scope during a full moon last year, all except for the central nebula, which was 4 seconds. The Canon Photo Stitch software has never given me an acceptable result, so I spent a few days correcting numerous patches of the background until I decided I'd just make it all an even black. Hence it is not an accurate representation of the sky - no photo ever is. It's still a little grainy in some areas and not a very deep image, but it's so much more aesthetically pleasing to have sharp stars!