Seeing Orion One More Time Before It's Gone

Tonight was a nice warm clear night, so the telescope seemed much more attractive than Netflix. I didn’t have any real targets in mind, so I thought I’d try for some nebulas again. Orion worked well last time so I wanted to try and do that one even better, and see if I could catch a globular cluster or nebula. The crab nebula was pretty high in the sky and right near Mars so it should have been easy to find.

In the end I didn’t find the crab nebula, maybe it’s too dim for me to see with a dobsonian.

For Orion I used my 0.5x focal reducer with my 8” dobsonian and ZWO ASI290MC camera. Gain was 500 and the exposure time was 150ms. This is a pretty long shutter time so I didn’t bother tracking by hand, I simply let Orion drift through my field of view and would reposition it every once in a while. I then went back and manually deleted the images that were taken during the repointing. I ended up with nearly 1000 good images of Orion.

I’ve never taken dark frames before, but I thought it was a good idea, and I put the cover back on my telescope and took 100 more frames.

I don’t have much experience with DeepSkyStacker since I usually use Autostakkert, but DeepSkyStacker did noticeably better on this image.

I used GIMP to adjust some levels and curves, bring up the shadows, and add in a tiny amount of saturation. The image is still a bit grainy, especially when viewed on a desktop screen, but it’s by far the best nebula shot I’ve ever taken.

These images are stunning, but I think my favorite targets are still the planets and spacecraft. I don’t think spending the money necessary on a tracking mount is really worth it for me. Maybe when I hit the powerball I’ll think differently!