The Horsehead and Orion Nebulas

This is my favorite time of year when I can see the spectacular Orion constellation in the night sky. The intent of this image was to show Orion's Belt of three young blue stars on the left along with the Horsehead and Orion nebulas. To the lower left is the reflection nebula Messier 78, and in the very lower left corner is a small portion of Barnard's Loop, the remnant of a supernova explosion millions of years ago.

This was taken using a Rokinon 135mm lens at F/2.8 attached to a cooled color APS-C astronomy camera (ZWO ASI2600MC Pro) with a dual-narrowband filter to capture the ionized hydrogen and oxygen within this area of the Orion Molecular cloud. The image is a stacked composite of 144 3-minute exposures. The lens and camera were attached to a tracking mount (ZWO AM5N) to allow the long exposure photography.

All image stacking was done in PixInsight, with the majority of post-processing also done in PixInsight and some final small edits in PhotoShop.