So this shot is from data captured on two separate nights a couple months apart - Feb 5th or so and March 5. Thirty five minute exposures were stacked together and processed for this one along with a bunch of calibration frames to reduce noise from the camera sensor. The full resolution processed image is about 800MB.
Astrophotography noobs (me a year or so ago) always shoot the Orion Nebula, Andromeda, and The Pleiades starting out. They are all beautiful and relatively easy to capture - this one is a little harder as some of the interesting details are pretty faint.
This is the Flame and the Horsehead nebulae. The Horsehead, just right of center, is a bunch of dark dust and gasses silhouetted in front of an emission nebula. The red color of the emission nebula comes from ionized hydrogen. I don't yet have enough data to capture a lot of detail from the Horsehead so mine looks more like a dragon or the head of some serpent.
The Flame Nebula just left of center is adjacent to Alnitak (just below it in this orientation), the eastern most star in Orion's belt. Alnitak is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. It is estimated as being up to 33 times as massive as the Sun and a diameter 20 times greater. It is some 21,000 times brighter than the Sun. It's ~1,260 light years away. I need a couple more hours of exposures to really nail this one but by the next new moon, Orion will be so low in the sky by dark that I'll probably have to wait until next year to improve it.
Enough babbling...
