M42 with a Full moon

[mswhin63]

I thought I would go for broke.

Here is M42 only 120-second exposure with the el-cheapo CLS filter.

Clipped the blacks-only slightly. One thing that may be the reason for some improvement is that I tuned my mount. Previously getting variations of +- 2 now get +- 1 or average of 0.46 according to PHD2.

Again like my M8 done on the same night quick and dirty process, I am sure I can make a better effort in the coming days. I had to crop this heavily as my framing was out a lot.

Cheers

[xa-coupe]

I must find out how you process, that's beautiful. Given that it's with one exposure, it's even more impressive.

[mswhin63]

Oops not a single exposure, quite a few exposures sorry.

[xa-coupe]

Even so, I like the processing.

[mswhin63]

Thanks Jeff,

I have added two new processes to get this.

1) Starnet win - Star removal program and
2) High Pass filtering with Gimp

Along with my other processes mostly SiriL and StarTools, I have seen some great improvements in my processing. Still got more to do.

[h0ughy]

nice start, probably clipped too much, but thats the thing you can reprocess the image so many times and have different outcomes.

[mswhin63]

Yes, you are right, I noticed a couple of other M42 images, I looked at my earlier processing and saw what I thought was gradients. Turn out it was more nebulosity. So back to the drawing board :P

[mswhin63]

Managed to reprocess this as I noticed a significant amount of banding using SiriL. It is the main reason for the heavy clipping earlier.

This time round I used DSS and x3 Drizzled without crashing :party:

I found no banding this time but I noticed a lot of blue saturation went away. I was able to regain the blue using Startools and in my opinion seems quite good. The image shown is majorly cut down, but possibly over sharpened. Even after all these years still learning.

The camera is my Canon 450D with the SVBony CLS, which I feel is serving well. For its price, it seems good, but I have nothing to compare with.