New Capture M42

[samgibbs]

I know the poor old Orion Nebula make frequent appearances but i wanted to catch one last image before the winter season ends. Telescope Plane Wave CDK 508mm
This is a fairly crude construction of LBGR and Ha. Exposure times of 90 to 100 seconds.
I want to do more with the subs but that will be later.
Unfortunately the image looks quite compromised at 200kb

[Anth10]

M42 is always worth capturing and it's wonder never ceases to amaze. A nice image, well done.

[samgibbs]

Thanks for your kind words. I guess no astronomers year would be complete with out some M42 :-)

[Mickoid]

Nice smooth processing, still looks good at 200kb. Orion is visible in our skies after sunset but it is very low in the sky now. Will have to wait until our Spring when it will then become an early morning target once again.

[LostInSp_ce]

Very nice Sam. M42 never gets old and it's always nice to see all of the different ways that people portray the same subject.

[raymo]

I am a bit intrigued Sam, your image shows some blue at right from the star
out of the frame, but none of the blue nebulosity around M42 itself.
I have attached an old pic of mine taken with a smaller scope, and using
shorter subs than yours, but showing plenty of blue nebulosity.
Must be something to do with the processing I suppose.
raymo

[doppler]

Just a question about the scope that you are using, (after googleing the Plane Wave CDK 508mm), orion fits in the field nicely in your pic whereas in my "little" 250mm I can barley fit it in, that must be a really fast scope, so I'm with Raymo I would be expecting a big blast of photons with that sized mirror on that object? Just a bit puzzled.
Cheers Rick

[cometcatcher]

Maybe Sam has a full size sensor? What's the camera Sam?

[samgibbs]

Firstly my humble apologies for not replying sooner. I have been between countries.
Raymo On this image i have combined BGRL and Ha frames at roughly equal exposure timings. When i do the colour attribution, frame stacking and combining i am generally looking for what i feel is the best representation of each frame in the image as a whole. Whilst i realize this is a bit of trial and error i do also look carefully at work that has been done by other amateurs and from professional observatories. One area i am currently investigating is how colour attribution is done with the Hubble images. I believe they have some processing techniques that are publically available that help to ensure proper or true colour balance. At the end of the day i think some artistic license should be allowed and from my side, i like slightly less colour saturation and prefer to balance toward the Ha subs which are mostly reddish hue.

[samgibbs]

Hello Doppler Rick et al

Here are some details concerning the telescope used to take this image.

Plane Wave 508mm
F 4.6
FLI 4008 x 2762
horizontal and Vertical scaling of 0.81 arc sec per pixel

Its a tremendous machine and well worth taking for a cosmic stroll.
I will post an updated reprocess of the same image shortly.

[samgibbs]

I have been working on the same image and experimented with selective gaussian blur in the Filters that worked nicely to smooth out the pixelation of the fine detail.
I have posted the full res image here.
https://plus.google.com/photos/photo/101096715632612092773/6426875282271420066?icm=false&authkey=CP3T6uOUvPu9xAE

[samgibbs]

BTW Thanks for all the messages of support and questions.
It's what make ICE so cool.