My first attempts at imaging the M42 nebula were during a visit to a client minesite on Halmahera Island in Eastern Indonesia.  The region would be a very dark site if it wasn’t for the lights that the mining camp keep on.  Even with that it was vastly superior to the night skies found in Jakarta.  All stars of the constellation, including the sword were visible to the naked eye, as was plaeides and many other structures normally washed out by urban light pollution.

The first of the following photos were made using my Canon 70D with 70-300 EF zoom lens mounted on a skywatcher Star Adventurer tracking mount.  Several 30s frames were taken then stacked together in Deep Sky Stacker then cropped and edited in photoshop.  You can see that even at only 30s there is still some star trailing evident so my polar alignment of the mount left a bit to be desired, but still not bad for the first attempt.

The last photo has been generated from data downloaded from rawastrodata.com and then edited by me as a comparison of what can be done with reasonable data – something for me to aspire to !

The skies at site allowed me to also try imaging Pleiades and comet Lovejoy which was around at the time, however the additional zooming used for these meant that the star trailing was even more evident .