SHOOTING STARS
THE ORION NEBULA is visible to the naked eye, just below the three stars of Orion’s belt; it is approximately 1350 light years away, and estimated to be 24 light years across.
“I use specialist filters to capture certain emissions from the gases, in this case Hydrogen Alpha [Ha], Oxygen III [OIII] and Sulphur II [SII],” says Chris Baker. “I varied the exposure times so the longer exposures capture the detail of the extended wispy trails and the shorter times capture the detail in the brighter central region. To assign the colours I use a convention developed for the Hubble Space telescope: this means that I assign the SII to the red channel, Ha to the green and OIII to the blue channel. Using
