Orion Season has Officially Started!

[Atmos]

Had some time up my sleeve on early Saturday morning while camping in Eumungerie, NSW. Ended up with 33x300s at ISO400 so as you can imaging, the core of M42 is pretty well blown out! I'll have to fix that in the coming weeks when I can get some 60s and 20s bits.

Processing so far as been stacking, colour calibration and a basic histogram stretch. I plan on getting a fair bit more exposure before I'm done :)

High Res on Astrobin (https://www.astrobin.com/full/366995/0/)

[cometcatcher]

Looks great! So much to see in running man too.

[multiweb]

Really well done Colin, lots of nice nebulosity between the trap and the running man. :thumbsup:

[Atmos]

At longer focal lengths the Running Man is a point of interest unto its own :)



Really dark skies helped :thumbsup:
I'm thinking that maybe a small 9 panel mosaic may be the way forward ;)

[Placidus]

Mike: Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous ...

Trish: Go Nikon!

[strongmanmike]

Aaah camping and imaging a match made in heaven :)

That's a lovely looking Sword Col, really like your colours and the image has a natural look to it. It's not that bad or anything but what is causing the flares on the stars?

Mike

[Atmos]

Camping, imaging and binoviewing with a 4” doublet (seeing wasn’t crash hot). I’ve taken a page out of Suavi’s book and not gone all processing hungry on it ;)
The native adapter that comes with the scope has a back focus of 53mm which is about half way between Canon and Nikon distances (52 & 54.5mm) so some of that flare is caused by inaccurate back focus from the corrector. There is also some tilt so the top of the image is slightly worse than the bottom but not distractingly so.



Nikon for the win :lol:
Thanks :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Just having another look at this Col and it is really very nice. It's already a fine image but I recon if you can add exposure to this and go deeper and complete the shorter exposures for the trap area (but layer in gently so it doesn't look like a dark hole in the nebula!), then keep what ever processing attack you used here throughout, this will be a really fantastic, natural and realistic shot of the Sword area :thumbsup:

Mike

[Lognic04]

Woohoo Orion time!:cool:

Iceinspace should stack all the orions collected this season for a thousand hour long integration :question::lol:

Beautiful image!!!

[Ryderscope]

Oh oh! It’s that time of year again. Need to dust off some unfinished projects from last year :D looks good Colin. I’m liking tracking your work.

[Atmos]

I’ve still got some targets in the Milky Way I’m photographing so I will just be pointing over to the east for a few hours a night. I did attempt to take some 20s and 60s images for the core (was just doing some text exposures on the core) but it wasn’t until a week later that I realised that flat fielding without corresponding darks causes horrendous over correction when flat fielding so my 20s and 60s stacks are completely unusable. Considering I only had 8 of each, I didn’t loose much ;)



There was someone a few years ago on Astrobin did that this with a very deep result.



Thanks Rodney. “That season” has started again. I wanted to get this out there before it very quickly hits the “not another one” feeling :lol:

[JA]

It looks great Col. The thing that I love about your image is the softness of nebulosity against the starkness of the stary background. It really POPS. :thumbsup:

Look forward to the final with shorter subs for the core and/or even more overall exposure.

Best
JA

[graham.hobart]

really lovely feel to it col, subtle, gentle waves of colour

[Atmos]

I decided to run it through some Instagram editing to make it pop more ;)



I think subtle is a description of “lack of processing” :lol:

[SimmoW]

Yes mucho promise already Colin! So natural and detailed.

Always knew the latest generation of CMOS cameras would come thru with the goods :)

[codemonkey]

Nice one Colin. Shot with the Nikon D810? Unmodded / not the D810a? My wife has a D810 that basically goes unused, every so often I think about giving it a run for some wide field stuff...

[RickS]

Looks great already, Colin, and you have plenty of time to add to it :thumbsup: