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 M2 was shot (16x10 minutes) at Ft. Griffin, Texas using an Astrotech AT6RC scope mounted on a Celestron CI-700 mount. Autoguiding was preformed using an 80mm f7 scope piggybacked on the imaging scope. The imaging camera was an Orion StarShoot II Pro Color camera. The guide camera was a Mead DSI 1. PHD2 was used for autoguiding. Nebulosity 4 was used for imaging capture, calibration, aligning, stacking, combining and color balance of the combined image. Photoshop 5 was used for image stretching, image vibrance, color adjustment and cropping.
