I’ve always been fascinated by the Horsehead nebula. And, I know that right next to it is the equally stunning Orion Nebula and the lesser known Burning / Running Man nebula. In 2018, toward the end of my time in California, I decided to try an ambitious project of capturing a multi-panel mosaic of the region that encompasses those three features. I figured that if there’s enough ionized gas, dust, etc to form those gorgeous nebula so relatively close then it must be a very active region of space. … I was not disappointed!
In fact, the image literally took my breath away when I first saw all 16 or so panels normalized and stitched together. I used the Hydrogen-Alpha filter and each panel is a single 30-minute exposure for high contrast. This could turn into a multi-year effort to gather a little more data on this region year by year to further bring out the faint details. I’d like to also capture some Oxygen-III and Sulfur-II filtered light to allow for some false-RGB color rendering of the region!
This image was produced using around 16 x 30-minute exposures of different points near by in space. The telescope was the William Optics Star-71, connected to the QSI683WSG camera and Lodestar X2 guide camera on top of an Atlas EQ-6 mount. Programming the capture of the mosaic coordinates was made possible using Sequence Generator Pro, and the image was processed, normalized and stitched together in PixInsight. More information on this image can be found on its Astrobin page.
