I don't like the cold. Unfortunately, one of the showpiece nebulae in the northern hemisphere, Messier 42, also known as the The Great Orion Nebula, is pretty much a winter denizen. Sometimes, we get a nice day early in the year that allows comfortable viewing/photographing of this nebula, but not very often. This year has been horrible. It only recently started warming up, and yet we're still fighting what I think are cloudier than usual conditions that have been persisting for the past couple of years.

Finally, last Friday looked promising to drag out my new astrophotography set up and try to learn how to use it. Before then, I had only had it out once for a short time before I got colder than I cared to be. Anyway, the skies Friday night were clear, but very hazy. The TCAA's "dark" site was completely surrounded by sky glow much worse than usual. Even worse, M-42 was awash in the light dome coming from that ^%#%&@* Dixie truck stop in McLean. Even so, I wanted to try to get some stackable exposures.

The image below (click on it for a much larger version) was taken with my Canon XSi @ 800 ISO, 300mm EF-L lens @ f/4. It is a stack of 20 X 30 second exposures using in-camera dark frame subtraction for a total of 10 minutes of unguided exposure. Not a lot, but it was all I could get before the nebula got into the trees to the southwest. There's much more there, but I have to totally wash out the background to pull more nebulosity out. I might try a reprocess later, but I've already been working on it for three days.

A promising start. I was also able to get about 20 minutes of the open cluster M-44 in Canis Major, but I haven't processed it yet. That'll have to wait for another posting.