Southern Orion in a Wide Field View
An image of Orion from January 2023 taken with a QHY268C cooled astronomy camera mated with a Samyang 135mm lens to give a very wide field view.
Full sized image here (opens in a new tab).
The image is composed of 56 x 120s exposures at F2.8. I used my wide field rig with autofocus to get the stars and nebulosity sharp and tight. I captured flats, darks and dark-flats. Mounted on NEQ6 with a guider scope and image data captured with NINA. All pre and post development is done in PixInsight.
Captured over two nights 20th and 23rd January 2023 when Orion was high to the south. From my back yard in Saxondale, Nottinghamshire - suburban, Bortle 4-5.
I have also captured the Constellation of Orion here.
Collinder 399 "The Coathanger" Samyang 135mm
Collinder 399 or Brocchi's Cluster is offered nicknamed "The Coathanger" for its striking resemblance to that wardrobe item! If you look at the stars in the middle of the image and it looks very much like a coathanger on its side. It is located within the constellation of Vulpecula - The Fox - within a larger asterism called The Summer Triangle. The Coathanger is a chance, line-of-sight effect and the stars that form the appearance of the coathanger are not physically associated with each other at all and range from 350 to 2300 light years in distance.
The stars are backdropped against the vast clouds of glowing hydrogen that dominate the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.
Image Technical Data
Uncompressed version of the image is here (opens in new tab).
Image captured in my backyard in Nottingham, UK on Sunday 20th September 2020. I used a Samyang (Rokinon) 135mm DSLR lens with a Moravian Instruments G2-8300 cooled CCD camera. This was mounted on my NEQ6 mount and guided with a Skywatcher Evoguider and ASI120MM guidecam. All exposures are binned 1x1.
Red > 12 x 300s; Green 10 x 300s; Blue 11 x 300s
All processing is done in PixInsight and image capture was with SGP.
