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Old 18-04-2012, 07:24 PM
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barx1963 (Malcolm)
Bright the hawk's flight

barx1963 is offline
 
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Mt Duneed Vic
Posts: 3,978
Elyse
All sounds about right. M42 (the Orion Nebula) will very rarely show colour in a big scope. I have a couple of times seen faint pink shadings with my 12". In your scope ( a 6" right?) it would be very unusual to see any colour.
We are all abit spoiled by seeing all the astro images showing gorgeous colours but the colour recptors in your eye are just not very sensitive, so dim objects appear as white or grey.
As an exercise, there should be bright patch of starlight in M42 that with a bit of power (the 10mm EP should do it easy) you can seperate into 4 stars. That is the Trapezium and is the group of stars that have recently benn born in the nebula. There are many more stars there they are just obscued but dust and gas.
Saturn is hard to pick out many surface features, maybe a few hints of banding, wait until Jupiter comes out next year and you will get some nice colours and bands then.

Malcolm
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