Silvia Kowollik, one of the winners of our astronomy cameras competition sent in the following deep sky image. It was captured with the camera that she won.

Accompanying her e-mail, she added the following (translated from German):

On Tuesday evening, I was able to capture my first deep sky object using a color filter, from my balcony. The image is of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) and was captured with a DMK 21AF04.AS and Astronomik color filter. I own a small Fraunhofer refractor telescope (100/500) and have reduced the focal length to 287mm, using a Shapley lens and 5mm spacing ring. I was thus able to image the entire nebula.

I am very happy with the camera. I would never have thought that using such a short exposure time it would have been possible to get so much detailed information onto the CCD.

A great thanks go out to Silvia for this spectacular image.