The trapezium

The Trapezium

At first glance this may seem like much to look at, but bear with me. It represents my best attempt so far at teasing out detail within the incredibly bright core of the Great Orion Nebula. Four of the stars at the core of this iconic nebula are called the Trapezium, and it is somewhat of a right of passage for burgeoning astrophotographers to be able to resolve them in their images. The reason it is challenging is because the nebula is so luminous that even short exposures drown nearly everything out.

This season the idea came to me to go after them using my Planewave CDK24 telescope coupled with narrowband filters that only allow ionized hydrogen and oxygen wavelengths to pass through to the camera. Held in your hand, my hydrogen alpha filter looks like a mirror as so little of the visible spectrum is allowed to pass through it.

Using these filters and combining hundreds of short 10 second exposures, I was able to resolve more details within Orion’s core than I ever have before. If you swipe to the 2nd image in this post you can see the 16 stars that I was able to resolve in the very inner core, including the Trapezium (the 4 biggest bright blue ones) as well as 12 other fainter stars of varying colors.

I know it’s super nerdy, but I was so excited to be able to see these things hiding within the overwhelming glow. Let me know what you think!