I live in a Bortle class 9 area (inner-city/ terrible light pollution) so taking pictures of the night sky is a lot of trial and error, pointing my camera in a general direction and blindly shooting at sub-200 iso and screwing around with varying lengths of exposure.
Last night I sat in my driveway for three hours with a mug of tea and finally captured a very cruddy image of something mildly interesting: That little pinkish half circle in the middle is M42, the Orion Nebula. Itโs a cloud of hydrogen gas and dust 8 quadrillion miles from my back yard, which means that the picture youโre looking at is actually from 1,500 years ago. The nebula is 12 times larger than our entire solar system and has around 700 baby suns incubating inside it.
