Mosaic of Orion's Belt and Sword

[MarkS]

I shot this on Boxing Day evening after treating the family to live view demonstration displayed on a TV set - Orion, Flame and Horsehead Nebulae followed by the Pleiades.

The image is a mosaic of 4 pieces, each piece is 50min total integration time 100 x 30sec at ISO 10000.
As usual it's the Sony A7S on the Tak Epsilon.



Larger version here: http://www.markshelley.co.uk/Astronomy/2016/orion_belt_sword_20161226.jpg

The interior of the Orion Nebula was "borrowed" from a previous image.  I really need some shorter exposures to control the brighter stars a bit better.

Mark

[Carole]

Absolutely beautiful

Carole

[RobertM]

That very impressive Mark.  You must have had some very good skies to produce that.

Are you finding ISO 10000 more usable or is it just to get the histogram in the right place ?

Robert

[MarkS]

That very impressive Mark.  You must have had some very good skies to produce that.

Are you finding ISO 10000 more usable or is it just to get the histogram in the right place ?

Thanks. The sky was actually slightly worse than average that night with an SQM reading of 20.7 instead of the usual 20.8-20.9 
On a good night (e.g. 21.2) it would have definitely been a better image.

I'm using ISO 10000 to get the back-of-camera histogram to the right of centre, which is the only way to avoid that problem with the horizontal coloured bands on the left hand side of the split sensor.

Mark

[JohnP]

unbelievable Mark - superb as usual.. still waiting for the book John

[Mac]

hmmmm that look fantastic especially on my new 5k monitor,   

Mac

[julian]

Another great image Mark.
Put me down for a book   

[The Thing]

I've lurked on this posting for a couple of days now as I can't think of a fitting superlative. So I'll just say really really nice image Mark.

[MarkS]

Thanks everyone for your kind words.

Certainly there are tweaks here and there that will improve it further but other than that, this is an image I'm really pleased with.

Mark

[Kenny]

Another fantastic image. Absolutely stunning.

[MarkS]

Another fantastic image. Absolutely stunning.

Thanks Kenny.  This is a Winter project I've waited a few years to do.  After 2 disastrous Winters (from a cloudy nights point of view) we finally have a Winter where there has been a few clear nights

Ideally I'd like to do a mosaic of the whole Orion Constellation but I know I'll never get sufficient clear nights for that!  So I made do with that image taken with a lens in the other thread.

Mark