Remembering Earth-that-was
A chestnut. Taken with a small (61mm) low-power telescope from my light-polluted back yard. Heavily cropped, otherwise it would be too small to identify. I’m running into the limits of my equipment — this is about 200 individual one minute exposures stacked together, taken over two nights.
Actually there’s another nebula, making three all together. The Orion Nebula proper, also known as M42, is the large spread wings brightness in the lower center. Separated from M42 by a narrow dark lane is the tear drop shape in the slightly left upper dead center, M43, apparently also known as “Mairan’s Nebula”. And finally in the upper third is the dimmer”Running Man” Nebula, in the top.
I’m getting better at this, but it is an incremental process.
The standard image of the Rosette Nebula is a glorious swirl of red gas sprinkled with a multitude of glittering stars. This, on the other hand, is a dim, noisy, dirty smudge covered with a multitude of oddly distorted spots. Still, it represents progress. My first attempts yielded nothing.
