April 5th, 2020, 8:40 p.m. local time
On Sunday night, in addition to imaging Venus, the Pleiades, and the Moon, I also pointed the camera towards the Orion Nebula. This was mostly an experiment, as I had never imaged M42 without the aid of a telescope.
As this time of year, the Orion Constellation is falling into the West after Dusk. So the nebula, along with the surrounding stars that make up Orion’s sword, are at an angle towards your right. This is in the Northern Hemisphere; in the Southern, I assume the configuration is “upside down” and would be angled towards your left.
I took a number of images of the nebula, playing around with the exposure and ISO settings. The image included with this post is the best in my opinion, with only some minor post-processing touchups in an attempt to remove background noise.
I would like to do long-exposure stacking of deep sky objects again, but my “new” DSLR camera only outputs raw images in a format (CR3) that my software programs cannot handle. The old standard was CR2. I haven’t checked recently if any programs like DeepSkyStacker now support CR3, but I should.
Image settings for reference:
- f/5.6
- 2 sec exposure
- ISO 3200
- 260mm lens length
- Minor post-processing in PaintShop Pro
