* Astronomy

Orion Nebula: Stack of 8 images captured with a 8" f5 reflector and Canon EOS 350D. 

Title: A MUSE map of the central Orion Nebula (M 42)
Author: Peter M. Weilbacher (1), Ana Monreal-Ibero (2), Wolfram Kollatschny (3), Adam Ginsburg (4), Anna F. McLeod (4), Sebastian Kamann (3), Christer Sandin (1), Ralf Palsa (4), Lutz Wisotzki (1), Roland Bacon (7), Fernando Selman (8), Jarle Brinchmann (5), Joseph Caruana (1), Andreas Kelz (1), Thomas Martinsson (5 and 9 and 10), Arlette Pécontal-Rousset (7), Johan Richard (7), Martin Wendt (1 and 6) ((1) AIP Potsdam, (2) GEPI Meudon, (3) Uni Goettingen, (4) ESO Garching, (5) Leiden Observatory, (6) Uni Potsdam, (7) CRAL Lyon, (8) ESO Santiago, (9) IAC Tenerife, (10) Uni La Laguna)

We present a new integral-field spectroscopic dataset of the central part of the Orion Nebula (M 42), observed with the MUSE instrument at the ESO VLT. We reduced the data with the public MUSE pipeline. The output products are two FITS cubes with a spatial size of ~5.9'x4.9' (corresponding to ~0.76 pc x 0.63 pc) and a contiguous wavelength coverage of 4595...9366 Angstrom, spatially sampled at 0.2". We provide two versions with a sampling of 1.25 Angstrom and 0.85 Angstrom in dispersion direction. Together with variance cubes these files have a size of 75 and 110 GiB on disk. They represent one of the largest integral field mosaics to date in terms of information content. We make them available for use in the community. To validate this dataset, we compare world coordinates, reconstructed magnitudes, velocities, and absolute and relative emission line fluxes to the literature and find excellent agreement. We derive a two-dimensional map of extinction and present de-reddened flux maps of several individual emission lines and of diagnostic line ratios. We estimate physical properties of the Orion Nebula, using the emission line ratios [N II] and [S III] (for the electron temperature T^e) and [S II] and [Cl III] (for the electron density N^e), and show two-dimensional images of the velocity measured from several bright emission lines.

Read more (4290kb, PDF)

The Orion nebula captured with a 100mm f5 Helios refractor and EOS 350D camera. Motorised EQ1 Mount.

Prime focus.

Clear sky 

The Orion nebula.

ISO 1600, 20 seconds.

Canon EOS 350D and a 100mm refractor. Prime focus.