The Orion Nebula (M42)
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2/2025
ASI2600MM, 360mm f/2.8, 13.7h (RGB 3x1h, Lum 2.5h, Ha 2.5h, S2 2.3h, O3 3.2h)
The Orion Nebula is visible as a nebulous blob with the naked eye under good conditions and a nice target for binoculars. Details may only revealed through a telescope, though.
M42 is said to be a beginners target and nice for small telescopes, because of its brightness. A more thorough evaluation of the surroundings will reveal that it is a rather demanding target due to the high contrast.
The extremely bright nebula is in fact embedded in a rather dark molecular cloud, which require a decent amount of integration time to be visible at all.
To realize this image I used a variety of exposure times to avoid both a burnt out core and handling of thousands of subs. The luminance stack of this image contains about 300 subs with an exposure time of 5 seconds, and aout 200 subs of 30 or 45 seconds.
The Great Nebula in Orion had also been one of my first lights with the 100mm APO telescope three years ago (ASI2600MC Pro, 30x 180s):
The following crop show the contained Messier object M43, the De Mairans Nebula next to NGC1977, the Running Man Nebula.