There is probably no astrophotographer who hasn’t photographed the famous Orion Nebula. I’ve captured it many times — from large-scale images using telephoto lenses and telescopes on an equatorial mount with tracking, to untracked wide-angle shots on a tripod.
This time, however, I decided to run an experiment: to shoot it with a relatively long-focus telephoto lens (300 mm), but using short exposures without any tracking, and see how much faint detail could be extracted with such an approach.
For this, I used a Nikon D3S DSLR (once nicknamed the “Low Light King” thanks to its excellent high-ISO performance) paired with a fast Tamron SP 300 mm f/2.8 LD IF lens.
The data was captured in March 2025 from my balcony over five nights, with 5,212 one-second frames taken at ISO 10,000 — giving a total integration time of about 1 hour and 26 minutes.
I wish I’d set a shorter interval between frames. I left it at 3 seconds, but a shorter gap would have allowed me to capture a lot more in the same time.
Overall, I’m happy with the outcome, but the process felt like a test of patience. Constantly nudging the lens back on target every five minutes was annoying enough — and then came the mountain of 5,000 frames to align and stack. Let’s just say my computer spent more sleepless nights than I did. 😄
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