Why?
In summer and early fall (in the northern hemisphere of Earth) when we look south at night we are looking in the direction of the center of our own galaxy which is packed with stars, nebula and dust clouds which blocks our view of far away galaxies in our region of the universe.
So I am working on capturing a lot of galaxies this spring!
I went to the Hubble Space Telescope's sight to see how my image's colors and detail compared with a like-sized Hubble image. Do you know which is which?
Click on the image to see a larger view...
Got it figured out?
Ok, mine is on the left and the Hubble's is on the right.
Probably wasn't that hard to figure out! Still I am pleased with how close I did get given that my setup is on planet Earth and cost me $2,000 while Hubble's shot was from space and cost $4.700,000,000 !
Here's more info on the Hubble Space Telescope's shot of this Orion Nebula
(source: NASA's Hubblesite https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2006/01/1826-Image.html)
This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. Some of them have never been seen in visible light. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon.
The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium stars are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds" and are too small to see clearly in this image. The disks are the building blocks of solar systems.
The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light. Astronomers call the region a miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape. The Orion Nebula has four such stars. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected from the Trapezium stars - collide with material.
The faint red stars near the bottom are the myriad brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does. The dark red column, below, left, shows an illuminated edge of the cavity wall.
The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon.
The Orion observations were taken between 2004 and 2005.
A stack of 17 - 2 minute shots at iso 1600 with a Celestron Nexstar 6 using a Canon T3i (unmodded) camera with at L-Pro filter on a Celestron AVX mount. Taken March 6, 2022
NOTE: click on the pic to get a larger version!
Taken with a monochrome 5 megapixel camera on an 8" SCT Meade LX200GPS with a Baader solar filter and a 2X Barlow len.s Of these two ...
