Orion
I like Orion, it is definitely my favourite constellation. He marches across the winter sky in the north, truly the warrior, dominating our view to the south.
Below is a picture of Orion rising over my back gate (and the neighbours houses). I took this with my phone - which has a professional mode allowing up to 30 seconds exposure, but limited to 15 seconds to avoid star trails). I did use a tripod and a bluetooth shutter control to keep the phone steady.
This isn't strictly a 'real' picture. I took a number of exposures and stacked them to increase the contrast in the night sky. Because these images focussed on Orion, this meant the wall and houses 'moved'. So I then pasted them back in using a mask to eliminate the blurred version. Of course, doing this and keeping the man made sky glow on the horizon is tricky, but I can assure you this is pretty close to what you can see with the naked eye (the colours are better to be honest, if you zoom in you can even make out the red tinge of Betelgeuse). All I can say is try this yourselves and then decide if this is a 'real' photo or not.
Anyway - how can I show you what Orion actually is in the above photo - if you are not familiar with the constellations then that is just so many points... Well, I found a site though a rather good tutorial on removing cloud cover (How to remove clouds and other noise) Astrometry.net that will plate solve your night sky images. So I used it on my image of Orion (after removing the walls etc. so I just submitted the stars) and got this back (which I then put the walls etc. back onto so you can compare)
There's a lot of detail, Star names, and the outlines of the constellations. This helps brings nightsky photo's to life for those not familiar with the constellations. Hopefully you will learn to recognise them without help if you can't already.
So, now I want to move deeper into Orion, his sword to be exact. There is a very bright nebula in there which is visible to the naked eye and can even be seen in the above pictures.
So, I used my big telescope on this. The first time I used a Celestron planetary camera, quite a low pixel count and not really designed for nebulae, the second attempt I used a Bresser deep sky camera, which is much more optimised for such things. I won't go into detail of the aquisition software used etc. Just show the two images. Celestron on the left, Bresser on the right.
