“Horse Head” and “Great Orion Nebula” in narrow-band

Main page▹Observations	8.1.2020 \|

We all used to the fact, that long exposure photography reveals cosmic structures so dark, that human’s eye cannot see them even in very large telescopes. What’s more, light from gaseous nebulae can be “enhanced” using narrow-band filters (more precisely, narrow-band filter of course cannot gain the light from nebula, but it very effectively suppresses disruptive background sky light, so it cannot overwhelm faint nebula glow).

This two-panel mosaic of the famous nebulae in the constellation Orion is a good example of such image – it reveals gaseous structures far away from bright M42 Great Orion nebula as well as much less bright Horse Head silhouette darn nebula. And because Mario Zauner used Hα, OIII and SII narrow-band filters, image is presented in false colors.

Mario used his G3-16200 camera on Esprit 100ED APO refractor to accumulate about 5 hours of exposures in Hα spectral line and 3 hours for each OIII and SII spectral lines for every panel.

This image was also published as NASA APOD — our congratulations to Mario!