It's Karl again from Astroimagery.com!

I hope you are keeping well, and if you're out doing any kind of astrophotography, please stay warm!

I've been away, visiting my daughter in Bali and my brother in Australia. All in all, my holiday took me away from home for 4 weeks. I have then been waiting for the weather to clear and the moon to dim to start taking images of the night sky once again.

Two days ago was the first time in two months that I had done any astrophotography!

But I managed to finish the project I had started back in December, which was to photograph the Flame Nebula, which lies beside the Horsehead Nebula. I wanted to focus my attention on this wonderful part of the Orion constellation before winter passes.

In December, I managed to take only 18 images, each with six minutes of exposure. The results told me I needed more imaging time. Finally, three nights ago, I got the chance. The skies cleared, and it was a gorgeous evening. In Turkey, it is now about 9 degrees in the early part of the night, but I always cool my camera to exactly 0 no matter the season.

So after a few technical hitches (after one month away from Astro, I had to remind myself of a few things that were previously automatic),.

I added another 22 images to make a total of 40 images, each lasting six minutes, so that's a total of 4 hours of integration time. This means that noise is reduced by about 6 times compared to one single shot.

Here's the image: