In the mid summer of 2019 I finally had my photography rig working well enough to start taking some of those iconic images that everyone has to take sooner or later, my first of these was the Andromeda Galaxy and it felt gratifying to do a god job on that. It’s just magnificent in the sky…
Not Horsing Around
So I thought I would tackle two of the other images in the ‘ya gotta take these sooner or later” category which were the Horsehead Nebula and the Great Orion Nebula. The Orion Nebula is a great visual object as well while the Horsehead is elusive visually until you get up into the 20-inch diameter telescope range. The only time I’ve ever seen it visually was in a 30-inch.
The first image I took this night was the Orion Nebula since it’s slightly farther West and would be setting first. I wanted really good detail and depth to these iconic images so I decided on 2 hours of exposure time for each.
I had tried at least half a dozen times to photograph the Orion Nebula going all the way back to the days of film and also with the new digital equipment but never really got the shot I wanted for whatever reason. Things had been going so well with the rig lately that I thought it might be the big opportunity when an absolutely perfect moonless Sunday rolled around in mid November 2019.
The challenge in processing this shot in the computer is that super bright area from which everything seems to emanate. it’s so bright compared to the rest that you have to find a way to bring up the brightness of the wispier, more tenuous parts of the cloud without completely overexposing and ‘blowing out’ the bright area and the nearby detail. So I edited it for a couple hours, then threw it all away and started over using what I learned to get this version.
Saddle Up
I’d been seeing great photos of the Horsehead Nebula literally since the 60s when I was a kid. Of course the Hubble does a good job with this kinda thing in the modern era. I wanted my attempt to be credible so I thought two hours would be about the minimum time to get a detailed shot.
The Horsehead nebula is just off the leftmost star of Orion’s belt, “Alnitak”. This is a superbright, easy naked eye star so you know that you’re going to have this ‘searchlight’ style beacon in your shot and when you go to process it it’s difficult to bring out the detail in the nebulas without having Alnitak photobomb every corner of the image.
I think this turned out very well. You can see lots of filamentary detail in the gas curtain behind the horse head figure and there’s good contrast in the Flame between the darn nebulas and the glowing hydrogen gas.
Don’t forget you can click on these images to open them bigger in a lightbox style format.
Hope you enjoy these and hearing about what you have to go through to make it all happen; I know it’s got me fascinated!
Bill Gwynne
aka. Bill the Sky Guy