The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest and most spectacular objects in the winter sky. Easily visible to the naked eye, I thought I’d be posting loads of pictures of it over the last few months. Unfortunately, most of this winter has been gloomily cloudy by day and by night in Southend. Still, I managed to get a picture a few nights ago with the smart scope, the Seestar S50.
For comparison, here’s an older one taken with my six inch reflector.
I had to modify the colours in the old image to try and make them look a bit like the new one. The smart scope applied a light pollution filter which, as its name suggests, cuts out a lot of common light pollution wavelengths. This allows a lot more detail to be recorded. The original colours in the old image looked like this. If you look through a telescope this is more like what you would see.
Orion is moving rapidly westwards. There isn’t much time left to enjoy it before it disappears for another six months or so.
I thought I might add a little note about all these “M” numbers that I keep quoting. They’re from Charles Messier’s 18th century catalogue of objects.
As a young boy, Messier saw a comet in the sky. He was so amazed by this that he devoted his life to discovering comets. He was well aware that there were a large number of fuzzy blobs in the sky that could easily be mistaken for comets, but which aren’t. So he decided to compile a list of rubbish-things-that-aren’t-interesting-because-they-aren’t-comets. The Orion Nebula is number 42 on Messier’s list of rubbish-things-that-aren’t-interesting-because-they-aren’t-comets.
Platitude of the Day 