With all the great photos of the great Orion Nebula being posted recently, this humble effort of mine seems a bit redundant. However, probably what sets this apart (a little) is being able to reveal the darker dust clouds around the nebula despite the fact that all the images were taken with an unmodified DSLR. It took a fair bit of processing (which is why it may seem a bit over-done), and you can see at the top and bottom left the bias noise sneaking through even though I used bias frames during stacking - pretty much stretched it to the max. ​
View this in greater detail, and download a full resolution for free (if you want) from my gallery.

There can't be many people who don't recognize the great contellation of Orion (the Hunter). With its bright stars, the blue-white super-giant Rigel, and the red super-giant Betelgeuse, the jewel that is the Orion nebula (M42), and much loved horsehead nebula (IC434), and the faint sweeping red nebula of Barnard's Loop (the barely visible arc at the top half of this image). Alas, with my DSLR unmodified (i.e. still has its IR filter), some of the deep red of Barnard's loop is hidden...but most of this mighty constellation is now revealed in this image.

You can download a full resolution copy of this image from here.

Been meaning to image this one for a while, but its taken a bit of effort to get my skills (and equipment) up to scratch, as this one's a bit of a harder target - at least in my mind. Taken last night at Gingin, Western Australia, in between high level clouds and distant lightning storms (which fortunately stayed at a distance, but periodically lit up the clear night sky).

M45 Pleiades (or the Seven Sisters) is an open star cluster containing hot B-type stars, and is easily spotted with the naked eyes. The luminous nebula are dust clouds which were once thought to be related to cluster but are actually unrelated interstellar medium (well, thats what Wikipedia says...).

The image is available for download from here.

My first session with my telescope for 2016 (and for a couple months), so I decided to pick an "easy" target (easy because it is bright and relatively simple to find and photograph). This image was taken from the dark skies of Namming Nature Reserve, Western Australia.

The Great Nebula in Carina is one of the largest diffuse nebulae in the night sky, and is four times larger and also brighter than the mighty Orion Nebula.  It also contains the high luminous hyper-giant star Eta Carinae (100-150 times the mass of our Sun, and four million times as bright), the Homunculus nebula, the Keyhole nebula, and the Mystic Mountain (a dust-gas pillar made famous in a Hubble image).

This image was a quick stack of only 8 images with an unmodified Canon EOS6D through a Skywatcher 120mm apo telescope. I would've like to do more, but I had the moon rising and I needed to be quick.

To view the image session details, and to view / download full-resolution, you can find the image in my Astrophotography 2016 gallery here.