Why have I never seen this nebula imaged before? What a fantastic region!
Hanging off the top of Orion's club, this tight grouping of 5 objects from the Sharpless catalogue makes a superb grouping for the narrower field of view.
Moving roungly from left to right, we have Sharpless Catalogue SH-258 as the tiny faint mark on the left. SH-255 (IC2162) and SH-257 form the two bright spots. Then the tiny SH-256 resting in the bottom left corner of the larger diffuse SH-254.
The brightness of this region is shown by the relatively short 300s frames and 1.5 hours imaging time I used on this image. I hope to come back next season for the full 4 or 5 hours.
This image was taken back in the days when the homemade telescope mount didn't work very well at lower declinations, hence the poor star shapes.
I love this region of Sharpless catalogue HII regions and will be coming back in the 2012/13 season for sure!
View full sized image of IC2162 Nebula SH-254 SH-255 SH-256 SH-257 SH-258
Captured in Maxim and processed in photoshop. Total integration time 1.5 hours
This image was autoguided using my homemade off axis guider and my black and white SC1 webcam.
Imaged with my homemade telescope mount
Exposure Details :
Astrodon 6nm Ha 19x300s on 200mm @ F5 with ART285
Curdridge Observatory, Southampton,UK