Thursday, March 15, 2012

                                               This is the processed image.
                           This is the original unstacked, unprocessed single Image.      

   I originaly had this in tab titled pictures but, decided to put it on the main page. This is a combination of about 10 images. I had help reprocessing this so I cannot take the credit for how wonderful it looks.
   This was my first image through my new imaging Telescope. This is The Great Nebula in Orion. Which obviously is in the constellation of Orion. The Catalog name is Messier 42 or just M42 as well as NGC1976. This Nebula is a region where stars are forming. It is approximately 1,344 +/- 20 light years from Earth. To put that in perspective a " Light Year " is how far light has traveled in one year. Which is about 6 trillion miles. so just multiply that by 1,344 and you get the distance. That comes out to 8,064,000,000,000,000 miles. To travel there in our fastest Man Made Spacecraft would take approximately 300 billion years. Also the picture I took was basicly Time Travel if you will. Because this object is 1,344 Light Years away, the image you are seeing is of light from 1,344 years ago. So it would have been around the year 668.

1 comment:

Stacey Ridgway said...

This one, out of many, is my favorite. I'm looking forward to viewing more of the wonderful cosmos with you.