DESCRIPTION: Discovered in 1610 by Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, M42 is approximately 1600 light years from earth, the span of its gas clouds are several hundreds of light years across, and its magnitude is 4.0. M42 is a winter time object for North America, and is one of the most photographed object in the sky even if it is cold out during the exposures. The Orion nebula is located in the constellation Orion and is just below Orion's belt (three star that form a straight line). At a dark location you can see M42 as a bluish haze.
LOCATION: Elmhurst, Illinois
DATE: 11/27/98 12:54AM
SCOPE: 10" Meade LX200 f/6.3
FILM: Fuji 400
EXPOSURE: 10 minutesNOTES: I took this picture to gain more experience with manual auto guiding, and as you can see it turned out pretty good. This shoot was done when the sky here was fairly dark which is a problem here. It was also the first time that I had used a new focal reducer from Meade(f/6.3). Their was a lot of vignetting which is now know to be an inherent problem with these SCT's, so the image has been altered to remove the segments where the light field is limited.