This rendition of the Great Orion Nebula (and the Running Man just next door) follows just about a year after my first effort (located in this same gallery). While I'm far from being an "expert" astrophotographer, I think anyone would agree that this is a significant improvement over my earlier attempt. In fact, I was honored to have this image featured on the cover of the June, 2009 issue of "The Reflector" magazine, a publication of the Astronomical League.

The image you see here is actually a digital composite of several "stacks" of shorter exposure images. By compositing them, I was able to preserve detail in the core of the Orion nebula, while also capturing the very faint dust that surrounds the nebula.

Captured on Nov 22, 2008 at the ASKC Dark Sky Site near Butler, MO.

Capture / Processing Details:
Telescope: Megrez 90 FD / 0.8x Focal Reducer / Field Flattener vIII
Camera: QHY8 Cooled Color CCD
Mount: CGE
Guide Scope: Celestron C11 @ f/3.3 / DSI Pro / PHD Guiding

Composite layers:
18x10 sec
18x45 sec
11x240 sec
10x480 sec

Subexposures captured with Nebulosity 2. Individual layers combined and stacked with DeepSky Stacker. Resulting images processed in Photoshop CS2 and aligned with Nebulosity 2. Final compositing in Photoshop CS2 using layer masking techniques. Processing tools also include Noise Ninja and Carboni's Astronomy Tools Actions for Photoshop.

I'm not entirely satisfied with this image - I think I stretched the 480 second stack too far and brought out too much noise, which I then had to tame with Noise Ninja. So there's a good chance I'll re-work this image in the coming weeks, trying to strike a better balance between signal and noise.