A bit over two years ago over at the Narrowband Channel on YouTube, Ben recommended the then-new Olympus f/5.0-6.3 100-400mm zoom lens for astrophotography, both lunar and deep sky. Although I didn’t follow his advice immediately, a year ago I purchased this lens from Schiller’s Camera in St. Louis and a few weeks later purchased the OM System OM-1 from the same vendor, trading in my EM-1 Mark III and several lenses to do so. Over the following months I discovered this lens-camera combination produced fantastic results for butterfly and bird photography (e.g., pelicans, eagles, and cardinals), but I didn’t really get going using it for astrophotography until I acquired the Sky Watcher Star Adventurer GTi late last November. Unfortunately, winter began shortly thereafter and with winter come clouds. Lots of clouds. But I have been able to try out this entire camera-lens-mount combination during a few good evenings this winter and thought I should present my results from photographing the Running Man and Orion Nebulas, the latter considered by many astrophotographers to be the most beautiful of the deep sky subjects.

This image is the result of stacking 33 150-second images (82.5 minutes of total integration time) taken on the evening of January 20, 2023, from my house’s rear deck, which is made out of wood—the worst surface for maintaining a steady camera setup.  The skies in my city of 125,000 are rated as Bortle 8.  To facilitate the tracking process I used guiding with PHD2 software, a ZWO 120mm guide scope, and a ZWO ASI120MM-S guide camera. In addition to the 33 150-second lights, I also made dark, flat, and flat dark calibration frames which were used in the stacking process. The 33 light images were taken with the aperture wide open at f/6.3 and an ISO of 1000 (recommended by Ben for the OM-1). The lens was extended fully to zoom in at 400mm. After acquiring these images, I stacked them in ASTAP (thanks to Ben for recommending this program) and processed the stack in PixInsight and Photoshop. The result is the image below, with which I am very pleased.

I hope this image demonstrates how well the OM-1 and Oly 100-400mm in combination can do DSO astrophotography and will encourage others to use this combination for astrophotography.

Note: Ben and his Narrowband Channel are focused on astrophotography using Olympus gear as well as dedicated astrophotography cameras and telescopes. Thus this channel is a useful source of information for micro four-thirds users who wish to pursue astrophotography with their equipment.

Al

The Running Man and Orion Nebulas taken on the evening of January 20, 2023