My sharpest m42 image

[tornado33]

Hi all
On Saturday night the seeing was pretty good even though some high cloud about. I got m42 with carefulfocus and tracking

Its a combination of 4x10 mins, 3x100 secs and 2x30 secs, all at ISO200 and unfiltered so as to recieve near IR as well as visible light. Taken with modded 350d, Baader MPCC coma corrector and 10 inch f5.6 newtonian, off axis hand guided.
Scott

[multiweb (Marc)]

A beauty indeed! Very well done.

[gregbradley]

That's a great presentation of M42.

Greg.

[Lester]

Very nice detail and colour, all the best Scott.

[AlexN]

Fantastically sharp in the core mate.. the trapezium is well defined!

[DavidU (Dave)]

I think this is a terrific image, nice, tight, good core and plenty of dust.
Well done

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Beautiful!!

[Bassnut (Fred)]

Gee, thats tight as, nice work. I particularly like the colour balance, not fussy and a smooth dark brooding quality to it. The core blend is also excellent, not blown at all, and lots of detail.

[CoolhandJo (Paul)]

The core is great!

[Garyh]

I like what you have done with this one Scott!

[davidpretorius]

thats is superb!

[telecasterguru (Frank)]

That is pretty fine.

Frank

[Peter Ward]

Colour is a little different, but Wow...amazingly tiny stellar points.

[duncan]

Fantastic image!!!!!!!!!!

[tornado33]

Thanks all
It was a challenge to present the core in detail as well as the outer areas. I used 2 stage masking, using an intermediate 100 sec set of 3 images then two 30 sec images for the brightest parts of the core.

I can imagine what life would be like on a star system in the core, you'd never know true darkness, the whole night sky would be flourescing like a permanent aurora.
Scott

[cybereye (Mario)]

Wow, what a great photo! Love the Trapezium and the fine detail visible!

Mario

[iceman (Mike)]

I'd prefer a bit more saturation/vibrancy in the colours, but it's a lovely, sharp image with M42 smacking you right in the face.
Nice work Scott!

[iceman (Mike)]

This image is this weeks IOTW.

[alan meehan (Alan)]

Nice going Scott well framed and nice and smooth,well done on IOTW

[Paul Haese]

Lovely image Scott. Great core and nebula integration with lovely detail in around the core. There is some fine speckle on the outer edge of the image which is likely from the longer subs. That aside, I really like the image.