M 78

M78, also known as NGC2068, is a bright reflection nebula within the Orion molecular cloud complex. This wide-field image also includes the bright nebulae NGC7129, NGC2067 and NGC2064. This group of nebulae is located about 1500 light-years from Earth and many Herbig-Haro objects (energetic jets of forming stars) can be found within it.

The image is a pure RGB composition taken with TOA-150 and STL11k camera, and obtained in four nights between October and December…2009!!  (As the long cloudy period continues without being able to acquire enough new exposures, I have spent some time reprocessing this image). Total exposure time of the image is 11 h.

Reprocessed from scratch with Pixinsight 1.8.9-1 (the first processing, rather poor, can still be seen on my website, was done with Pixinsight 1.5).

Click on the images for a higher or full resolution version, or go to the Gallery section for complete exposure details.