ajamesmccarthy

How Orion looks to cameras in dark skies

Added 2021-02-08 19:46:18 +0000 UTC

This is the orion constellation- but it's hard to tell at first. You can see the bright orange betelgeuse in the upper left, and the belt about 2/3rds in from the left at the center. At the bottome of the belt is the horsehead and flame nebulae, and to the below right of that is the famous Orion nebula (which I recently share an up-close picture of). That's the Rosette on the left. The gaseous parts of space are extremely faint, and the red areas are on the cusp of the light that is visibile to our eyes, so we don't really see much of it. The Orion nebula is bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, but the rest of this requires either a camera with a reasonably long exposure or massive telescopes that can gather the faint light they emit.

Even so, this image requires processing to bring out these details. For that reason, I attached a single unedited image from my camera. You can see how light pollution really washes over everthing, but the brighter nebulae are still visible. My camera is modified to allow more of the faint nebula light to get in, but you can still capture these with any off-the-shelf camera.

The final image was created from 9 exposures stacked, each of which was 2 minutes long.

Edit: I added an annotated version, that seemed easier :)