ORION in full.

[ollypenrice]

Imaged with Paul Kummer and Peter Woods.

Phew! A heroic capture campaign run by Paul as Orion began to slip too low for comfort. We just made it by the skin of our teeth. 12 panel mosaic, Samyang 135, the best panels having 3 hours, the worst a lot less! TS2600 OSC camera and Avalon M Uno, jointly owned and based in our robotic shed. The Witch Head, M42, the Flame and M78 have been gently enhanced by telescopic data but the image really is mostly Samyang. Pre-processed in APP, then Pixinsight and, mostly, Photoshop. 

Peter, Paul and Penrice. 

[ollypenrice]

PS the tiny hero of this effort: 

Olly

 

[mftoet]

That’s a wonderful accomplishment! Orion never gets old. 

[ollypenrice]

11 minutes ago, mftoet said:

That’s a wonderful accomplishment! Orion never gets old. 

Lucky chap! This project has made me old!!!

lly

[tomato]

Great result, how does it compare with your earlier Orion mosaic? I would hazard a guess it was done in a much shorter time.

[Mr Spock]

Quite spectacular 👍

[ollypenrice]

38 minutes ago, tomato said:

Great result, how does it compare with your earlier Orion mosaic? I would hazard a guess it was done in a much shorter time.

It's a very different animal. The one with which I helped Tom O'Donoghue was enormous and 'zoomable,' so you could close in and have M42 filling the screen. However, it was not the full Orion field, lacking the top of the Meissa nebula and the Witch Head. The new one (just) fits it all in, including the stars making the hunter's bow. I've just printed the new one at A3 without difficulty but its natural size isn't much bigger than that.

The other difference is that this is just natural colour with no added Ha. As a result, you get a more honest (and I think more interesting) proportion of dust to gas. This is considerably deeper on the dust, and has benefitted from the new processing software to make the most of that. I'm particuarly enjoying not using Ha at the moment because of this increase in the proportion of dust.

The big one took 400 hours, this one probably 35 or so.

Olly

[gorann]

Really nice! I like the way the 135mm FL is still able to separate stars in a "natural" way. With even shorter FL I get the impression of stars being merged into a shiny mass.

[wimvb]

Great image, Olly "Mary" Penrice. 😉

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

Peter, Paul and Penrice.

 

[Ouroboros]

Oh, wow!  Fantastic image. It took a while to get my eye in to see familiar objects. Also being wide field makes it look different, and also kinda upside down compared with how these objects are often shown. None the worse for that I hasten to add.  There is something different about the colour. What are we looking at wavelength/filter wise? 

[900SL]

Admirable! Nice work all.

[kirkster501]

Very nice.  I'm working on something similar but haven't got the blue and green channels.  Will have to wait until autumn now.

[ollypenrice]

3 minutes ago, Ouroboros said:

Oh, wow!  Fantastic image. It took a while to get my eye in to see familiar objects. Also being wide field makes it look different, and also kinda upside down compared with how these objects are often shown. None the worse for that I hasten to add.  There is something different about the colour. What are we looking at wavelength/filter wise? 

This is, pure and simple, RGB from our very dark site. It's from a one shot colour camera with no other filters. It looks unfamiliar because, usually, we see this kind of object in HaRGB or HaLRGB. Much of the brown dust in this image also contains ionized hydrogen so it will show up in Ha and come out as bold red in HaRGB. I like using fast optics with OSC because you get more dust and less gas, if you like, and in their natural proportion. That means more brown and less red.

Orion is this way up for me, in the northern hemisphere!  Australian mileage may vary...

Olly

[kirkster501]

Did you have the Samyang wide open at F2 Olly?  I find my example needs stopping down a bit to about F2.8 - F4.  

[ollypenrice]

24 minutes ago, kirkster501 said:

Did you have the Samyang wide open at F2 Olly?  I find my example needs stopping down a bit to about F2.8 - F4.  

Wide open, Steve. Corner stars are not perfect but once they are heavily reduced in processing, which they always will be on wide field images, it doesn't much matter.  On a 12 panel downsized to 5,500 pixels wide, like this, there really isn't any problem. It was never our intention to produce a giant, zoomable image. 

Olly

[WolfieGlos]

Viewed this earlier. Just come back to see it again. Breathtaking. 

[ollypenrice]

By the way, there are effectively three Witch Head nebulae, are there not? This fits in with my 'replicating shapes' obsession!

Olly

Edited March 26, 2023 by ollypenrice
typo

[Ouroboros]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

This is, pure and simple, RGB from our very dark site. It's from a one shot colour camera with no other filters. It looks unfamiliar because, usually, we see this kind of object in HaRGB or HaLRGB. Much of the brown dust in this image also contains ionized hydrogen so it will show up in Ha and come out as bold red in HaRGB. I like using fast optics with OSC because you get more dust and less gas, if you like, and in their natural proportion. That means more brown and less red.

Orion is this way up for me, in the northern hemisphere!  Australian mileage may vary...

Olly

OK. Thanks for the explanation.

I must have been standing on my head when I looked at it.  

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

By the way, there are effectively three Witch Head nebulae, are there not? This fits in with my 'replicating shapes' obsession!

Olly

In this image?

[ollypenrice]

2 hours ago, wimvb said:

In this image?

Yes. The classic Witch Head is actually the same shape repeated one above the other and there's a very similar shape just above them, fully detached.

I think!

Olly

[symmetal]

Most spectacular Olly and Co. 😊

With regard to the brown dust which stands out well, do you know what's causing the blue coloured 'dust' to the right of M42. There don't seem to be bright blue stars nearby, and if it was OIII emission I would have thought it would be a bit greener.

Also, it might be worth producing a version where Orion's main stars aren't so muted, so the image is more recognizable to those who just know Orion from the naked eye view. 🙂

Alan 

[ONIKKINEN]

Spectacular image, love everything about it. The usually mighty horsehead and flame area is just a tiny footnote in the incredibly busy surrounding area here.

The setup that took the image looks funny to me, there is about 3x more not-telescope than telescope in there! Cant fault it though when this is what it outputs.

[ollypenrice]

33 minutes ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Spectacular image, love everything about it. The usually mighty horsehead and flame area is just a tiny footnote in the incredibly busy surrounding area here.

The setup that took the image looks funny to me, there is about 3x more not-telescope than telescope in there! Cant fault it though when this is what it outputs.

That's because we started with a Samyang lens mounting kit made by Wega, a firm of shameless sellers of pure junk. This 150 euro 'product' immediately started falling to bits, piece by piece, so I had to use hardware I had in stock to keep the project going. I don't think we'll be changing it because it works fine. In particular, the focus belt tension can be very finely adjusted by moving the lens in the Altair Astro guide scope rings - which are very good.

1 hour ago, symmetal said:

 

With regard to the brown dust which stands out well, do you know what's causing the blue coloured 'dust' to the right of M42. There don't seem to be bright blue stars nearby, and if it was OIII emission I would have thought it would be a bit greener.

 

I wondered about the same thing. Given that the structures in brown, on the left, and blue, on the right, seem so similar (apart from the left being brown and the right blue) I'm inclined to think they must be the same stuff but illuminated differently. The brown dust to the right of the Horsehead also turns blue as you follow it upwards, confirming that it is probably the same stuff. So I think the blue is simply scattered reflection of the kind we see around the Pleiades. There are bright stars in the vicinity. Their true distance from the blue reflection may be disguised by differences in distance from us. We can't trust the visual 'side to side' distance because the near-far distance may be very deceptive. I certainly don't think it's OIII.

Olly

[Elp]

Stunning image. I haven't even finished my horsehead started in 2021 and another year has come and gone, great dedication to yours.

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

I wondered about the same thing. Given that the structures in brown, on the left, and blue, on the right, seem so similar (apart from the left being brown and the right blue) I'm inclined to think they must be the same stuff but illuminated differently. The brown dust to the right of the Horsehead also turns blue as you follow it upwards, confirming that it is probably the same stuff. So I think the blue is simply scattered reflection of the kind we see around the Pleiades. There are bright stars in the vicinity. Their true distance from the blue reflection may be disguised by differences in distance from us. We can't trust the visual 'side to side' distance because the near-far distance may be very deceptive. I certainly don't think it's OIII.

Olly

In Aladin ( https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?target=05 20 29.804-05 13 11.43&fov=22.94&survey=CDS%2FP%2FDSS2%2Fcolor ), based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, there are also two colours of dust in this area, the brownish related to HII and the gray/blue, which does not have a distinct identification. They may be at different distances from us, receiving light from different stars. Remember that for HII to emit its red colour, the gas must be illuminated by UV light from "nearby" stars.