M78

I think I’m starting to get my head round the new tools for the blog. And I’m going to try and be a bit less dismissive of my smart telescope. I’ll admit to being slightly miffed by the whole spoon-fed experience of it. It’s like all my knowledge of the night sky wasn’t worth bothering with, because it’s all there at the poke of a screen. It’s silly, I know.
Here’s M78, a reflection nebula in Orion. It’s certainly not a great astro-photo, but it’s captured such a lot that’s invisible even in my 10″ mirror. In fact, there’s three separate patches of nebulosity which have NGC number, (2071,2063 and 2064, going clockwise). At 1,630 light years away, (O’Meara), it’s pretty close as deep space objects go. I’ve used Nero to de-noise it and it’s given the picture a somewhat ‘milky’ texture. I’ll keep experimenting with post-processing. I’m still tweaking Jpegs, when I should be massaging the FIT files. I wish I understood the tech more.
But, I could find M78 quicker than the Seestar, if I had my Dob set up. Oh yes.