The Orion Nebula

Click to be able to see Venus

Last night was a clear winter night. That means a lot of stars were visible. Also the Moon, Venus and Jupiter were close together in the sky. I was even able to see Venus with my naked eyes during the day because the Moon was so close. It might be hard to see in this photo but Venus is close to the bottom right corner. It was so amazing to actually see one of the planets in the bright blue sky while the sun was still up.

Orion nebula without enhancements

Anyhow, that wasn't what this blog post was going to be about. The Orion nebula. A nebula you can also see with naked eyes (it's the middle "star" in the sword). Although I'm guessing not in daylight. I have seen it through binoculars and telescopes though. I've tried to photograph it through a telescope as well, but since I haven't got a camera adapter it was hard to hold the camera still. To take these photos I used my Canon EOS 550D (Rebel T2i) and my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM lens.

Orion nebula like I see it through my telescope

I took ten 1-second exposures to reduce the star trails. Then I used an old version of a program called DeepSkyStacker to stack the photos together. I made two different versions of the photo. One almost black and white that looks close to what you see when you look at it with a telescope. And one with some more colour in it.

Orion nebula with colours

Using a 200mm lens on a crop-sensor camera still makes the photo way too big. So I had to crop away most of the photo since there wasn't anything in it that I would use. As you can see in the photos I didn't make the crop in exactly the same place for all three photos and that was mostly because I'm lazy. At least they are the same size.