What to Lookout for this January!

The winter months are the best for astrophotography as they provide cold air, which holds less hazy moisture than balmy summer air, so clear nights are abnormally clearer than usual. Although it's harder to get out and take pictures with these cold conditions, the results are more rewarding than any other month. So if you're looking to capture some photos, these are the six best celestial bodies, two for each difficulty, to photograph during January!


Orion Nebula (M42)

Difficulty: Easy

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

My Personal Photo of the Orion Nebula

45 Light (1 min exposure, Gain 120) - 30 Dark - 30 Flats - 30 Bias

Total Integration: 45 Minutes

One of the most well-known nebulae in the night sky is Messier 42. The Orion Nebula has an extremely bright apparent brightness of 4 and is the nearest big star-forming region to Earth at barely 1,500 light-years away. Its prominent location is directly below Orion's belt, but it also provides a fantastic view of star birth for those using telescopes. This magnitude-four interstellar cloud of ionized atomic hydrogen contains the Trapezium, a young open cluster of four primary stars. The M42 nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, M78, and Barnard's Loop. With its high apparent magnitude and size, M42 can be seen with the naked eye and is the perfect target for beginners. Take any small telescope with a focal length of at least 300-400 mm and capture away. Even with a short 10-second exposure shot, you can see its bright core and dust structures surrounding it. The first image was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and is the sharpest view of the Orion Nebula ever. This mosaic, which has more than one billion pixels, was made using 520 separate exposures captured at various light wavelengths. The second image is my personal one, which I captured with a one-shot CCD camera and no guiding.

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Pleiades Star Cluster (M45)

Difficulty: Easy

Credit: Stefan Thrun

In the constellation Taurus, the Pleiades is a collection of more than 800 stars that are 410 light-years away from Earth. The assembly, which resembles a more petite, hazier Big Dipper in the night sky, is well-known to most sky watchers. An open star cluster, such as the Pleiades, is a collection of stars that all formed from a single massive cloud of gas and dust around the same time. The stars in the formation that are the brightest light a scorching blue, and they were formed within the previous 100 million years. They are far more luminous than our sun and will burn out much sooner than they will, with lifetimes of only a few hundred million years. This open star cluster is relatively easy to photograph for beginners with any small telescope of any focal length. On the other, the reflection nebula is harder to photograph cause it requires a vast amount of integration/exposure time. This image taken by Stefan Thrun is an excellent example of the reflection nebula surrounding this open star cluster. 

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The Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237)

Difficulty: Intermediate

Rosette Nebula in Hubble Palette

Credit: Terry Hancock

My Personal Photo of the Rosette Nebula in HaOIII

54 Light (5 min exposure, Gain 120) - 60 Dark - 60 Flats - 60 Bias

Total Integration: 4.5 Hours

This beautiful deep-sky object known as NGC 2237 is a large emission nebula located in the constellation Monoceros. The nebula is 130 light-years across and contains many Herbig-Haro objects and Herbig Ae/Be stars, Bok globules, T Tauri stars, and clusters of newly formed stars. The dark dust filaments extending toward the nebula's center, dubbed "elephant trunks," are shaped by stellar winds, radiation from hot young stars, and electromagnetic forces. This nebula's name comes from its stylized flower pattern, which resembles flowers used in sculpture since antiquity. At the center of it is NGC 2244, an open star cluster containing several O-Type Stars that generate large amounts of radiation and stellar wind. With its high apparent magnitude and size, this deep-sky object is renowned as one of the best targets during January. To capture a good image, you should have a telescope with a focal length of at least 500mm. If you want to take it a step further, you can use filters like RGB, Ha, OIII, and SII to extract the separate gas colors from the nebula's composition. The first image, taken by Terry Hancock, used these filters to create this dynamic photo using the Hubble Palette. I took the second photo with an Optolong L-Extreme filter to capture the Ha and OIII gasses in one shot.

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Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33)

Difficulty: Intermediate

Credit: Ryan Steinberg & Family, Adam Block, NOAO, AURA, NSF

The Horsehead, sometimes referred to as Barnard 33, is a cool, dark cloud of gas and dust that may be seen against the IC 434, a bright nebula. A young star that is still immersed in its gas and dust nursery can be seen as the brilliant spot on the left side of the image. However, this blazing star's radiation is destroying the stellar nursery. The nebula vaguely resembles a horse's head by coincidence. Its peculiar shape was initially spotted in the late 1800s on a photographic plate. The Horsehead nebula, which appears in the constellation Orion, is related to the well-known Eagle Nebula, a cluster of gas and dust pillars. Each of the two tower-like nebulas is a newborn star's cocoon. The region IC 434 is relatively big and can capture the horsehead and flame nebula in a single shot with a telescope with any focal length, though around 400 mm will be perfect. If you want a closer frame on the Horsehead, a focal length of 700 mm or higher would be adequate. This image taken by Ryan Steinberg shows the entire IC 434 area range and exhibits the various colors from the different gasses within the nebula. 

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The Crab Nebula (M1)

Difficulty: Hard

Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)

My Personal Photo of the Crab Nebula in HaOIII

16 Light (5 min exposure, Gain 120) - 60 Dark - 60 Flats - 60 Bias

Total Integration: 1.34 Hours

This rare deep-sky object known as Messier 1 is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. It is speculated that this cosmic explosion occurred in 1054 AD, making this object one of the youngest in the sky. When this supernova occurred, astronomers hypothesized the sky was so bright that it looked like daytime during the night for weeks. In addition to its extraordinary complexity, the strange filaments within this nebula also seem to have less mass than those ejected during the original supernova. This is one of my favorite celestial objects to capture because of its strange structure and intriguing history. Unfortunately, this object is quite harder to photograph because if its small apparent size. So if you cannot plate-solve your images, you'd be lucky to get a decent image of the Crab Nebula. I suggest having a focal length of at least 800 mm and using a Barlow lens to increase your magnification. The first image was taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2005 and is one of the largest mosaics the telescope has taken to this day. I took the second photo with an Optolong L-Extreme filter to capture the Ha and OIII gasses in one shot. The telescope I used had a focal length of 900mm, and even then, this target was extremely small.

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Tadpole Nebula (NGC 1893)

Difficulty: Hard

Credit: Craig Stocks (Utah Desert Remote Observatories)

About 12,000 light-years away, in the northern constellation of the Charioteer, is the Tadpole Nebula. The leading cause of this "tadpole" structure in the sky is star formations. This 100-light-year-wide cloud of luminous gas was shaped by stellar winds and radiation from the nearby open star cluster NGC 1893. The star-forming nebula is surrounded by a bright, recently formed cluster of stars produced in the interstellar cloud just 4 million years ago. These cosmic tadpole shapes in IC 410 may be the locations of active star formation and are ten light-years long. With a small apparent size, this target is fairly hard to capture and requires several hours of integration/exposure time. You would need at least a focal length of 800mm to capture some minor details of this nebula and "tadpole" type structures. This photo taken by Craig Stocks highlights the emission of sulfur (red), hydrogen (green), and oxygen (blue) gases.

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