Photo of the Week for February 24, 2017
We can’t let an entire winter go by without at least one shot of the Orion Nebula, can we? After all, M42 (as it’s also known) is the season’s most iconic deep-sky object. This particular portrait of the nebula has a bit of a twist, though—it was captured by Manuel Guerrero under less-than-ideal conditions. “Usually, I travel to the dark skies of Baden, Ontario, for deep-sky imaging,” he writes. “But some unexpected clear weather prompted me to give my back deck in Etobicoke a try. Unfortunately, I can’t see Polaris from that location and vibrations are also a problem. Then there is the light pollution from the nearby Gardiner Expressway. To deal with that, I used Astronomik CLS CCD and Orion SkyGlow filters. The image isn’t perfect, but all things considered, the nebula came out amazingly well.”
Manuel’s photo is a stack of six exposures ranging in length from 1 to 10 minutes at ISO 200. He used a Canon EOS 60D DSLR camera and Orion EON 80mm f/6.25 ED apochromatic refractor telescope to record the image data.
