Late M42

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

M42 and the Running Man.


I took this with an X-T1 modded with a Multi-spectra filter.


31 240sec ISO 800. No bias, darks or flats. Used- Rawtherapee to apply an auto dark and auto flat. Then aligned and stacked in Siril. Finished off with Star Tools and ImageMagick.


Still learning how to use this camera and process the images.

[Nikolas (Nik)]

The nebulosity is amazing but the core is a little overblown

[Mickoid (Michael)]

You certainly picked up the fainter nebulosity and dust most of us miss in capturing this object. I don't mind the blown out core, by doing that you've enabled us to see the other hidden beauty that surrounds it. What f-stop was it shot at? You've managed a lot of signal in just over 3 hrs integration, nicely done.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks. F6.1 with the flattener. You're right, the core's blown out. The aim was to capture the dust and nebulosity. And there's not much I can do about undersampling with my setup except drizzle. I'll work on it. ISO and exposure time need tweaking for dark sites. It's a good target for highlighting shortcomings.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Added a new attempt. More detail and the core is a little better.

[Ant0nio (Tony)]

Originally Posted by rcheshire

Added a new attempt. More detail and the core is a little better.

You're definitely on the right track Rowland. The second image is marked improvement & as Michael has said you've done a great job on bringing out the nebulosity & stellar dust .
Cheers,
Tony

[vin_ap (Caleb)]

This is a great image !! I have seen and taken many images of M42 but this image (especially the 2nd one) has so much detail and colour, it reminds me the beauty of this target. Well done !! So good !

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Thanks Caleb. It's not an easy subject and I'm surprised by the results. That first one was very fuzzy.

[glend (Glen)]

Nice one Rowland. You picked one of the hardest targets in the sky to expose properly. I have found that only layering and masking (in Photoshop) using both short subs for the core and longer subs for the nebulosity, produces the Trapezium detail we all want. Of course, that technique is considered a cheat by some, but really this is artistic impression.
Have you given up on cold finger cooled cameras?

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Hi Glen. The trapezium is not particularly effective with undersampling. At best, taming the brightness leads the eye away to other features.

Cooling was fun and educational. But the X-T1 seems to do quite well with the synthetic / auto dark and flat in Rawtherpee. Remarkably well from what I can see. Looks OK...

It means converting RAW to 16 bit tiff and then to fits in Siril - can't see a difference.

Siril also does a 2x drizzle which goes some way to improving the undersampling issue.

More time to play around with this new STC filter and camera settings. Less concern about calibration.

[ChrisV (Chris)]

Very nice detail in the extensive Ha around the nebula. Well done!