I’m learning the hard way (the only way I seem capable of learning anything) that there is nothing easy about astrophotography. The whole endeavor is really just a series of seemingly insurmountable problems that need to be fixed. You’re basically collecting photons that have been traveling for thousands or millions of years and that then have to fight their way through our atmosphere and light-polluted skies to finally splat onto the face of a camera sensor. It’s freaking daft, especially in a place like the Northwest where, if by some miracle it’s not raining, you have to fight 100’ tall trees for the view.
I went out last night, after a long, shite day, not expecting much. The forecast was bad, and I was getting a late start, and I still mostly don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and I wasn’t even intending to take any photos. But, I managed to get the Great Orion Nebula in view for just long enough to hook up the camera and get some detail. It’s allegedly one of the easiest deep sky objects to image. And while that may be true, imaging and imaging well are two very, very different things. Imaging well I didn’t quite hit. But, I did get a shot. My first of a diffuse emission nebula.
It’s the Orion Nebula because… it’s in Orion—part of the sword hanging off Orion’s Belt, one of the most famous and most recognizable pieces of sky. Why Orion *the hunter* carried a sword was always a mystery to me, by the way. Who hunts with a sword? Nobody. That’s who. Not even in Ancient Greece.
To ancient Indian astronomers, it was Mrigashīrsha, the Deer, being chased by dogs. From the hunter to the hunted. Now we’re getting more realistic. Who hunts with dogs? Us. We do. Way easier than throwing swords at things. Swords are for people who still live in their parents’ basement.
In any event, like most emission nebulae, Orion is a stellar nursary. The red glow is gas that’s been ionized from the baby stars that were forged in denser parts of the cloud. Eventually, they’ll blow the thing completely apart. But for now, it’s the closest star-forming region to Earth (about 1300 light years) and one of the coolest things in the sky. You can see it with the naked eye as a blurry part of the sword (visible in the second photo). Which is clearly still attached to his belt because, seriously: don’t hunt with a sword.