"Big Headless Running Giant" Nebula (Jan. 2016)

This is the name for the nebula given by my 7-year-old son.  Of course, the blue signifies reflection of starlight and the red emission of light by ionized hydrogen.  These are natural colors.

This is first light for an Orion 203mm f/4.9 Newtonian I just bought.  It's not an expensive scope, and it obviously has some diffraction problems.  I trace most of the problems to the mirror clips and the bevel around the mirror, which needs to be blackened or covered.  A mirror retaining ring would do the trick nicely.  I did attach a FT focuser, electronically controlled.  But the scope held collimation and imaged around the sky for five hours with up to 7-minute exposure without a hitch.  Seems to be enough to work with here.

This image is 39x180" with the SXVF-H9C.  I used the Baader MPCC flattener, which magnifies 1.15x, so this focal length is effectively 1150mm.  The image was shrunk to 67% to hide some noise and the funny star shapes caused by the diffraction and perhaps by a mirror that had not settled into the temperature early in the imaging run.