This very faint nebulosity in Orion is located just above the three belt stars, and is is plotted as a little green box nebula on popular atlases. Composed of dust, the strong blue coloration of this object gives clues to the particle sizes for scattering. A brown haze covers the largest portion of the nebula, obscuring dust over the illuminated portions behind. I first came onto this object as a dim featureless white patch in my deepest Schmidt camera images of the region years ago. This new image is much deeper, and brings in the faint outer details.

IC426 is approximately 15x10 arcmins in size and is classed as a b2 type reflection nebula.

Processing: This is my first LLRGB image, adapted from Robert Gendlers concept of using a heavily noise filtered LRGB as the RGB for a successive LRGB image.

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST7E w/Enhanced Cooling
Exposure:  L(LRGB) = 60:20:20:36 (RGB Binned 2x2)
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FMHW = 2.1 arcsec, Transparency 8/10
Outside Temperature:  0 C
CCD Temperature:  -35 C
Processing:  Maxim DL, Photoshop, AIP4WIN, PW Pro.