The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated south[ of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion. It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 light years[3][6] and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across. It has a mass of about 2000 times the mass of the Sun. M42 is one of the most viewed and imaged deep space objects.
This image of M42 was shot the morning of August 24 using an Orion StarShoot Pro Version II camera I borrowed from John Love, WD5IKZ. The camera was mounted to a Celestron C6N six inch Newtonian telescope. The C6N was mounted on a Celestron CI-700 mount and tripod. Auto guiding was preformed using an 80mm refractor with a Meade DSI Pro camera with PHD 2.3 software. The image is a combination of 6 five minute exposures. The images were calibrated, stacked and combined using Nebulosity 3.2.1. Final processing was done using Photoshop CS5.
