A vertical sweep with a 15mm ultrawide lens from the horizon to past the zenith, taking in a large part of the northern winter Milky Way. Orion is right of centre; Canis Major and Sirius (the night sky’s brightest star) are below and to the left of orion. The second brightest star in the night sky, Canopus, is just above the southern horizon at right. It just clears the horizon at 32° North latitude. Jupiter is the bright object at left, just left of the Beehive star cluster, M44, in Cancer. The Pleiades star cluster, M45, is at upper right in Taurus. The larger Hyades star cluster is below it. The small light dome on the horizon at left is from Las Cruces and El Paso. Otherwrise the site was perfectly dark and free of any man-made light sources. I shot this March 10, 2015 from the summit of the Trail of the Mountain Spirits Highway, Hwy 15, in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico, at an altitude of 7900 feet. I shot this in the last of the deepening twilight before the sky was completely black. Some twilight blue remains. The bright glow at upper right is from the top of the Zodiacal Light cone in the western sky - a natural form of “light pollution.” The image is a stack of 4 x 3-minute tracked exposures, with the 15mm lens at f/3.5 and Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. The camera was on the Star Adventurer tracker.
A mosaic of the Sword and Belt region of Orion the Hunter, showing the diverse array of colourful nebulas in the area, including: curving Barnard’s Loop, the Horsehead Nebula below the left star of the Belt, Alnitak, and the Orion Nebula itself as the bright region in the Sword. Also in the field are numerous faint blue reflection nebulas. The reflection nebula M78 is at top embedded in a dark nebula, and the pinkish NGC 2024 or Flame Nebula is above Alnitak. The bright orange-red star at far right is W Orionis, a type M4 long-period variable star. This is a 4-panel mosaic with each panel made of 5 x 2.5-minute exposures with the 135mm Canon L-series telephoto wide open at f/2 and the filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1250. The night was somewhat hazy which added natural glows on the stars. No filter was employed here. The camera was on the iOptron Sky-Tracker for tracking but no guiding. Shot from outside Quailway Cottage near Portal, Arizona, Dec 7, 2015. All stacking and stitching performed in Photoshop CC 2015. Stacking done with median combine stack mode to eliminate geosat trails through the fields.
The Orion Nebula, M42, with its companion nebula M43 to the north, and the blue Running Man Nebula at top (aka NGC 1975), all in a clear but moonlit sky, illuminated by a first quarter Moon, making the sky blue. So this can’t be a very deep image, but it shows the main features visible in a large telescope. The loose open cluster, NGC 1981, is at top — I should have framed this scene a little more north to better include the cluster. This is a blend, using luminosity masks, of three sets of exposures: 8 x 8 minutes for the main image content + 4 x 2 minutes for a mid-level exposure for the core area + 1 x 30-second for the Trapezium area right at the core. This sort of “high dynamic range” blending is necessary for M42 as it contains such a range of brightness that no single exposure can record it all. However, I did not use HDR methods to do the blending, but luminosity masks which are easy to make with one click in Photoshop — Command/Control click on the RGB Channel image — and they allow far greater control of the blending. This sort of exposure blending is needed because while your telescope-aided eye can see the faintest tendrils and the bright quadruple star system, the Trapezium, at the centre with no problem, cameras cannot. At least not in a single exposure. All were with the Astro-Physics Traveler apo refractor at f/6 with the Hotech field flattener and Nikon D750 (not modified) at ISO 200!
