12/8/02 The Great Orion Nebula

I used my ETX70 in alt-az mode and my SAC7 camera under near perfect seeing conditions on the night of December 7, 2002 to aquire data on one of our galaxy's most fabulous objects, The Great Orion Nebula. My image of this birthplace of stars covers almost 1 square degree, it is a composite of 4 individual frames. For each frame I took about 60 minutes worth of 15 second images (240). Of these, an average of about 100 images were of high enough quality to use for each of the 4 frames. This resulted in about 25 minutes of useable exposure time per frame. These were combined and aligned as described in my article on imaging with the ETX70 and the SAC7.