The Orion Nebula looked like a blurry smudge in my old photos from 2020

I got a new camera sensor and a hydrogen-alpha filter last month, and the difference is NIGHT and day. Now you can see the pink gas clouds and the Trapezium stars clear as anything. Anyone else have a piece of gear that totally changed their deep sky shots?

3 comments

3 Comments

amymartinez11h ago

Okay, the "pink gas clouds" part is a little off. That pink color in the Orion Nebula is mostly from hydrogen-alpha light, which your new filter is actually blocking out a lot of. The filter makes it stand out more, but the real color is more of a red. The pink you see in a lot of pictures is often from how the camera sensor reads the light or from editing. Your new gear is awesome, but it's cool to know what we're actually looking at.

sethc128h ago

Read somewhere that our eyes are pretty bad at seeing color in dim light anyway. So even without the filter, we'd never see those deep reds like the cameras do.

hall.ruby9h ago

It's funny how the camera changes things... my first telescope view was just a gray smudge. All that color really comes from stacking and processing the data later. Makes you wonder what our eyes are missing out there.