Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Orion Nebula through TS 70

Here is an image of the M42 Orion Nebula taken from the Travel Scope 70 with a Nikon D3100. I still have to find a mount with a motor drive so I can do long exposures and avoid the star trails.

 

The Orion Nebula (M42/NGC 1976) is also known as "the Great Nebula." It is a bright magnitude 4 emission nebula that is located in the middle of the hunter's sword (second of the three star looking points below the belt of Orion). The great wings of gas curve away from a glowing mettled core, lit by a quadruplet star system known as the Trapezium (hard to distinguish from the image above). Trapezium, easily seen in telescopes as a trapezoid of four close bright stars, is located at the heart of M42. It is a multiple system of newborn stars - a large collection of young stars and protostars called the Orion association. M42 is accompanied by a smaller detached nebula M43 (NGC 1982) which glows northeast of the nebula.

Here is a Hubble image of the Orion nebula:

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