On Monday night, Feb 8, 1999, members of the RIT Astronomy Club tried using the Observatory equipment to take images of the Orion Nebula. We discovered that it's harder to photograph than one might imagine.
We used the Orion Short-tube telescope (80 mm aperture, 400 mm focal length), which yields a field of view of about 1 degree with the Meade Pictor CCD camera. This is about the same size as the Orion Nebula. We did not use any filter -- which was probably a mistake.
We took a couple of dark frames, but only one of 30 seconds length. All of our other images were 30 seconds long. We really should have taken three to five dark exposures of the same length as our target exposures. Oh, well.
We moved the telescope away from Orion to take several "night flat" frames. One of these images shows bright arcs:
I suspect that a car drove past the Observatory during the exposure, and some of the light from its headlights bounced off the 16-inch telescope's truss and into the 80-mm telescope's aperture. We'll have to be careful about such scattered light in the future.
We took 2 images, 30 seconds each, of the Orion Nebula. It turns out that, without a special filter to block the glow of the bright Rochester sky, the Nebula doesn't stand out very clearly:
There is a faint glow around the stars near the center of the images, but nothing as clear and obvious as the eerie cloud one can see with the naked eye, or through a telescope. One of the problems is that we didn't take enough images to make a good flatfield -- so small variations in the background level mask the true nebulosity.
We could do better next time by taking longer exposures, and/or by using a filter to block out some of the unwanted sky light. A nebula filter (which transmits light of just those wavelengths emitted by the Orion Nebula) would be the best choice.