The Great Orion Nebula

We had unusually mild weather today, and those warm temperatures extended well into the evening. When I stepped out to check on what the sky looked like, I noticed that it was mostly clear. I grabbed my Questar telescope and did a little visual observing.

Although the seeing wasn’t too steady, I did manage to see Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, slide out from behind the planet itself. The dance of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons is something of a thing among amateur astronomers, and I was glad to see this event unfold before me. I hadn’t checked any ephemera tables that show when these kinds of events are to occur, so it was a bit of a surprise to me.

With Orion high in the sky, it also occurred to me that I hadn’t attempted any shots of the Great Orion Nebula this winter. I grabbed my Canon EOS M200, attached it to my Questar, and shot several exposures. This is the best of the bunch, the raw camera data being lightly processed using Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software:

This is not my best image of the Orion Nebula, but it’s not bad considering how the stars shimmered with the relatively poor seeing. As fun as it is to use a Questar telescope, it’s photographic focal ratio of f/16 makes it less than an ideal instrument for imaging objects in the sky other than the Moon and, with proper filtering, the Sun.

Not long after getting this image, the clouds began moving in. And with the rising Moon, the sky started to glow, too.

I was hoping to get some shots of my scope and the sky, but the cloud cover ended up photobombing me.