I am a member of the Louisville Astronomical Society, and have been having star withdrawals due to the weather. But I finally got the opportunity to take some astrophotos last night at the club observatory. Many amateurs have taken images of Messier 42, the great nebula in Orion. One of the challenges is to image the core and in so doing, image the trapezium stars at the core (the four stars at the center of the image below), which is difficult because they are so bright. I've done so on several occasions, but, despite the poor seeing and resulting soft focus, last night I managed to get a pretty good one. The following image is a stack of 60-10 second images taken with a Canon T1i mounted on a 200mm f5 Konus Newtonian with a Losmandy G-11 GEM Goto, autoguided with a Starshooter audioguide camera mounted on an 80mm f5 Orion Shorty autoguide scope, processed in photoshop.
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