BEHOLD! Gaze upon our works, our combined effort to bathe in the holy light of Messier’s 40th entry.

Here is the thing about other DSOs like M42. Everybody, their moms, and even Astrobackyard’s Mom have shot the Orion Nebula. It is, photographically speaking, the golden retriever of deep sky objects — beloved, beautiful, and present on the profile pic of every college-aged girl you see on Tindr. You know what nobody has a deep image of? M40. Frankly, its disgraceful that more people have not graced this area of sky with more effort.

You know who has the highest integration of M40 on all of Astrobin? ME. 80 hours, 40 for each star in M40. You know what the 2nd place entry is? Actually I just looked and its 35 hours which is actually a good start, but I’ve looked before and it used to be like 8-12, tops. But either way, even my 80 hours tops the charts.

Until Now. Today we enter a new age where any man may search “M40” on Astrobin and now find this: 740 hours of combined imaging time on these two points of pale light. Special shoutout to @Dan for use of his Argon-III filter and to uhhhh myself for using the H-Beta filter. After significant exposure times in both they showed….nothing! Except the two stars. That’s all that matters, really. IFN or some as-yet undiscovered shell of ionized nebula would honestly detract from such a wonderful view. Even with the significant amount of exposure time in both Luminance and H-Alpha, this area of sky is quite insistent that any faint extended background dust just sort of doesn’t exist. Maybe. There is a little faint glow here and there but its very tenuous.

This is the object for the true connoisseur. The astrophotographer who looks at a pair of perfectly ordinary 9th-magnitude stars and thinks: yes….this is all I need. The observer who understands Messier himself — was he plagued by comets, rushed by deadlines, possibly preoccupied with the passing of the Sugar Act by the British, which would eventually contribute to support of the American Revolution? Still, he left us not a boring target, but perfection. One star for each eye. A convenient excuse to stare at a blank-ish region of Ursa Major for months without being plagued by rich emission regions or clusters of galaxies, and all the while rack up the kind of integration time that makes your imaging partner (not your real partner, she left a long time ago) quietly suggest you stop touching so much grass and come inside.

It took Charles 39 attempts before he found perfection. M40: 10/10. Or 40/40. Or 2/2 if you’re just talking about the stars. Which all simplifies down to 1. Because M40 is everything. Much like Shrek, M40 is love. M40 is life.

No further notes. Charles was onto something and we will not be taking any questions except the all the questions here that we feel like answering.

Image Edit: @Julien De Winter and @Jonathan Hill

Image Description: @Brent Newton (me) and @Joydeep Biswas

Oh and capture was like ~4 JAN through basically last week. Trying to parse all the equipment, filters, usernames, and exposures in our spreadsheet was already insane without considering each date of capture.

Also look at all these DISGUSTING galaxies that distract us from the real prize

INFOGRAPHS for the Autists in the room (game recognize game, no hate)