Imaging the Orion Nebula

In the winter of 2020 I took up astrophotography. I was taking PHYS 275: Planets which served as my motivation for learning more about our place in the solar system and the universe at large. Since I also have an interest in the technology of optics and photography, I decided my goal would be to get a good picture of a DSO using my Nikon D7100 DSLR, and found out that the Orion Nebula was a good candidate. This was also around the time of the Great Conjunction so I got to view that too. Below is a set of three images, taken a few months apart, that I took of the Orion Nebula.

And below is the very first image I took; I had no idea what I was doing and mistook the shake in the camera for the rings of Saturn (not for long). On the top left is Saturn and the bottom right is Jupiter.

Overall I learned a lot more than I thought I would. There’s quite a few resources online that I found useful, and I learned a lot about the basics of image processing and how to use the DSLR to get the best results. Just a list of some of the things I used:

• DeepSkyStacker
• PixInsight
• The Astrophotography Manual by Chris Woodhouse (2017)
• Photoshop CS6 (has some handy pre-processing tools e.g. lens calibration)
• The Camera Manual (it was very well written)

I could go on and on about the things I learned, and some day I might, but for now here’s some more pictures.

Mars (top middle) and a Galaxy (M81 I think). Took a lot of post-processing for this one hence the pink area on the bottom and vignetting on the top left.

The Pleiades cluster. I hope to one day get a better shot of this, but I need better equipment first (planning on a mount like the Star Adventure Pro)

Aldeberaan (the bright one)

My camera hooked into an Explore FirstLight 127mm Mak-Cas telescope. Too unstable for DSOs.