I can't get it to look as good as you've already done Adam. You're really up against in so many ways here:
- Single sub, so no chance to stack out noise
- Tremendous amount of noise (darks, flats, etc would take out a LOT of this)
- sky pollution (poor signal to noise ratio)
- dynamic range (the Trap is totally blown)
- data collected at warmest time of year (although darks would help immensely)
M42 is actually a deceptively tricky beast to image well because it has such a huge brightness variation. A cooled CCD helps with colour noise and dynamic range, but you still need all the grunt work with calibration, stacking etc. Definitely worth learning it all well with the DSLR. Its quite a revelation how much easier it is to work with lots of well calibrated data from a dark sky site.
CCDs are getting better and cheaper in the background while you're learning the longer you hold off. ICNR as JJJ says well worth a go while you're experimenting. The only time I used to avoid it was if I was at a real dark sky site and wanted to make every minute count - better to use library darks then.
Don't ever underestimate the humble DSLR - just look at what Humayan and so many others here have done in the past with them.
BTW, your tracking in that is wonderful. Beautiful round stars even when blown up all the way
