Orion's Belt Region

November 3, 2019

Here's another shot from last night's imaging with the William Optics SpaceCat51 Apo Refractor and ZWO 071MC cooled camera, a wide-field shot with all three primary stars in Orion's Belt or the Three Sisters, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. I say "primary" because Alnitak (bottom one in this rotation) is a triple-star system, Alnilam (in the middle) is a supergiant on it's own and is 375,000 times more luminous than our star, the Sun. Mintaka (top) is a double-star system and the two stars orbit each other every 5.7 days. So yeah, I'd like to see that up lose--two massive stars spinning around each other that quickly. Bottom right you can see the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) and NGC 2024, the Flame Nebula to the left and a bit lower than the Horsehead with Alnitak between them. I used the Celestron UHC/LPR filter for these subs, and that's causing the halos around the brighter stars. I know the sticklers out there will think these are an abomination, but I'm okay with them, and I don't see halos as that much different from the diffraction spikes we get with our SCTs or Ritchey-Chrétiens. I mean the freakin' Hubble has diffraction spikes on the stars. I can deal with some haloing.