My yearly tribute to Orion.
The Orion Nebula aka M42 is a diffuse nebula. It is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth and is around 1,350 light-years away. It’s a very bright object and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light-years across. It has a mass of about 2,000 times that of the Sun.
The Orion Nebula contains a very young open cluster, known as the Trapezium due to the asterism of its primary four stars. The Trapezium is a component of the much larger Orion Nebula Cluster, an association of about 2,800 stars. These stars, along with many other stars, are still in their early years.
The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have directly observed protoplanetary disks and brown dwarfs within the nebula, intense and turbulent motions of the gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars in the nebula.
4 hours 27 min hours of exposure.
162×10 Lum – 80×60 RGB
Orion 8″ Astrograph f3.9 – Baader MPCC
asi2600MM – Gain:LRN @ -15c
ZWO-OAG asi290mm guiding
CGX Mount – Sequence Generator Pro
Phd – PixInsight – Photoshop
Imaged from Palm Desert, CA USA.
Bortle 8
