The Orion Nebula also known as 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 nebula, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 light years away and is the closest region of massive star formations to Earth. M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across.
January 23rd 2012
This image of Orion was taken with the WYAS 14" Meade SCT.
I used my Canon 40D with an f6.3 reducer to enlarge the view area to capture the full expanse of the Nebula. The image consists of 15 out of 30, 60 second exposures taken at ISO 500. This is approx. 15 minutes exposure time.Stacked in DSS (Deep Sky Stacker), saved as a 32Bit TIF file and then final processing was done in CS5.
Final processing can adjust the tones, color and overall image to show different parts of the Nebula.
The two images to the right are the same base image file but they have been processed differently in the final CS5 processing.
Which do you prefer??
March 27th 2012
This image was taken at a WYAS open night on the Telescope pad.
This image is a stack of 38 x 20sec. frames @ ISO 640 using my Canon 40D on my Celestron 8" U2K SCT. This is approx. 12.6 minutes exposure time. Images taken in RAW were stacked using Deep Sky Stacker software to create a composite image with final image processing done in CS5.
Note the overall exposure on all these images has not burnt out the star cluster in the middle of Orion. However, you can see that the blacks on the upper two images are much better than the lower image. This is partly due to the position of Orion in the sky in March and visibility in March was slightly cloudy which has not given as clear an image. HOWEVER, it does show that you can obtain acceptable images even when seeing is not as good as it could be.
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As a one off challenge, we set a competition for one night
to photgraph the full moon. 
Never look at the Sun through any Lens based device. Telescope, Camera, Binoculars, WHY !
Comet
ISON, also known
as C/2012 S1 is a sungrazing comet discovered on 21 September 2012 by Vitali Nevski, and
Artyom Novichonok. Comet ISON’s
nucleus is around 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) in diameter. Comet ISON orbit will come to perihelion
(closest approach to the Sun) on 28 November 2013 at a distance of 1,860,000 km; or 1,150,000 miles from the center point of the Sun. Its trajectory appears to be
hyperbolic, which suggests that it is a dynamically new comet coming freshly
from the Oort Cloud. On its closest approach, Comet ISON will pass about 64,210,000 km; 39,900,000 miles from Earth on 26
December 2013.
Never look at the Sun through any Lens based device. Telescope, Camera, Binoculars, WHY !
Looking at or near the Sun will cause instant and irreversible damage to your eye. Eye damage is often painless, so there is no warning to the observer that damage has occurred until it is too late. Children should always have adult supervision while observing the sun. If the above is the case, how do we photograph sun spots, prominences, partial / total solar eclipses ??? , by using special telescopes and filters that remove 99.999% of the harmful light thus allowing visual observation and images to be taken.
This is an image of the Moon taken on Friday 19th April 22:20 at the WYAS Observatory.
These image was taken on the 7th October 2012 at the WYAS observatory telescope pad, taken between 02:20am and 04:15am. It was a very clear night and not too cold.
The lower image is ISO 640, 15 x 120sec exposure giving a total of 30 minutes in total.
The Ring Nebula appears in the northern constellation of Lyra. It is a prominent example of a planetary nebula. This is a shell of ionized gas expelled into the surrounding interstellar medium by a red giant star, which was passing through the last stage in its evolution before becoming a white dwarf.
These two photos were taken on the evening of the 12th January 2012
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