Orion Was Only Supposed To Be A Test Imag, But Wow!

The other day I bought myself a focal reducer to widen the field of view of my telescope. I bought this so that I could see more geostationary satellites with my nicer planetary camera, with hopes of catching a full satellite eclipse. To my great frustration I simply couldn’t find the satellites last night, so instead I did a quick test shot on the Orion nebula.

I honestly don’t remember my settings because I wasn’t expecting it to be an image worthy of posting, or even worthy of post-processing. My shutter was likely set around 100-200ms and gain was set to whatever felt right. I took 4 different series of images as the nebula swept through my field of view, ending up with about 500 usable images.

I stacked the images in autostakkert, and adjusted levels, colors, contrast, and other things in GIMP.

This image isn’t much compared to people with fancy tracking telescope mounts, but this is by far my best attempt at the Orion nebula. There’s clearly cloudy texture and some color in that nebula!

With a wider field of view objects move slower through it, so I can leave the telescope on it longer to gather more uninterrupted frames. It might be worth trying a globular cluster again to see if I can get it any clearer.

Tonight my weather forecast looks perfect to capture a geostationary satellite eclipse, so lets hope I can find them this time!