M78 and Barnard's Loop

nebulae

M78 is a gorgeous reflection nebula near Orion. Barnard’s Loop, towards the right, forms a huge (relatively speaking) emission nebula ring around Orion’s belt and the Orion Nebula. Captured with a QSI683 and Tak FSQ 106, this image contains about 12 ea of RGB at 600s, 6 hours total integration.

While the galaxies would be easy to miss unless annotated, it’s amazing to think about those faint galaxies (PGC catalog) and what might lie inside them:

Resolution ........ 2.105 arcsec/pix
Rotation .......... 89.859 deg
Focal ............. 529.05 mm
Pixel size ........ 5.40 um
Field of view ..... 1d 56' 17.1" x 1d 21' 41.3"
Image center ...... RA: 05 47 36.647 Dec: +00 35 42.32