Photographing the Orion Nebula

Last Christmas we treated ourselves to an astro-tracker. A device on which to mount a camera which turns at the same rate as the earth rotates, hence keeping stars in the same place

I’ve had a few “plays” with it but recently set about trying to capture the Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas and dust situated approximately 1,300 light years away from the Earth. With the naked eye it is a fuzzy blob in the “sword” of the constellation of Orion.

The adjacent image shows its location in the constellation of Orion.

Using a Nikon D750 camera with a 600mm lens at f5.6 I took ten images of it for 10 seconds each time and this is one of the jpg images

I then ran all 10 images through a stacking program and then processed the composite image in Photoshop and this is the final result.

Share this Blog post