I changed over my astrophotography setup back to my Stellarvue SV80 APO refractor to image some wide-field targets that are now coming up in the night sky.
Last night I spent the night imaging two different targets, one new one for me and the other one of my favorites.
This first one is on of my favorites, the Orion Nebula. This nebula is easily seen with the naked eye in a dark location, is very bright and very big.
I shot this using narrow band filters (filters that only let in a tiny sliver in the spectrum of light). I edited it using the Hubble Palette, using a black and white camera and where the Sulfur II filtered image is assigned to the red channel, the Hydrogen Alpha filtered image is assigned to the green channel and the Oxygen III filtered image is assigned to the blue channel.
This image is a "stack" of:
30, 150 second H-Alpha images
30, 150 second OIII images
30, 150 second SII images
And the core (the bright area containing the trapezium stars) is made from a "stack" of
20, 60 second H-Alpha images
20, 60 second OIII images
20, 60 second SII images
The Orion Nebula is SO bright, that the core is always blown out on the main images, so you have to take a separate set of shorter exposures and blend the images together so you can see some detail in the core.
I never imaged this in the Hubble Palette before, I usually image it in RGB, or natural colors. I really like the way it turned out.
