M42 season

[The_bluester]

M42 was one of the first targets I had a go at when I borrowed Andy01's Stellarvue SV70T, so I thought now I have my own SVX80T and a new camera, time to try again.


This is an initial image, 100 X 10 sec exposures to preserve the core and 10 X 600 second exposures to bring out the dusty stuff. Cloud rolled through and put a stop to getting the rest of the 600 sec subs I wanted. I will have to go again and then consider if I start building a mosaic of the greater area. The aim would be on epanel per night if I do that so 20 or 30 X 600 secs might have to do on top of the 10 second ones I would need to take to make a proper mosaic of both sub lengths.



Integrated in Astro Pixel Processor and post on Photoshop, using a layer mask to bring the core through from the ten second subs.

Astrobin (Almost) full res here, 50MB is not enough to upload full res in an uncompressed format. https://www.astrobin.com/full/crfqhg/0/?nc=user

[xa-coupe]

Nice work. I think nearly everyone that started Astro started on M42 and has a soft spot for it.

[multiweb]

That's a superb shot. Very deep and sharp. Well processed too. :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[The_bluester]

I am pretty amazed at the smooth noise profile with only ten 600 second subs. The ten second subs I didn't even use darks for in this as I have not shot any at ten seconds yet.

[gregbradley]

Very nice Paul. A great result.

Greg.

[The_bluester]

Pretty happy with it as a starting point, now I am aiming to get another 25 X 600 second subs. I am also going to throw a few 900 seconds at it and see what they look like.

[Ryderscope]

That is a very good wider field view of M42 Paul showing a lot of surrounding nebulosity with good detail. Nice work :thumbsup:

[The_bluester]

A new revision with extra 600 second subs, 37 now rather than 10 of them. Blended through more layers and different stretch levels to reveal the core, though I am always on the fence about that, tossing up between "true" representation of the dynamic range versus blending data to reveal things not seen otherwise.


https://www.astrobin.com/full/crfqhg/B/?nc=user

[strongmanmike]

So, was this taken while sipping whisky with Andy..? :)

It's a well images area... but not hard to see why :thumbsup:

Mike

[The_bluester]

Partly so yes, this was happily imaging away while we got Andy's automation happening and whiskey was being drunk.

[strongmanmike]

These are the best moments in our hobby I recon :cheers:

For one of the nights I was doing my latest image of 1316, a mate came out to my observatory and we did several hours of observing together while I was imaging...plus the beer and whisky :D it was great :thumbsup:

Mike

[The_bluester]

Yeah, we worked out on Sunday that between life and COVID, he had not been out since January!

We even got a couple of moments to just lean back and admire the sky.

[Placidus]

The revised version is a HUGE improvement in the fainter nebulosity and the background. Well done. The bright part seems to be very blue.

[The_bluester]

Thanks. The big difference was a lot more 600 second subs, but I also redid the flats which improved the ten second subs no end.

I actually dialled the saturation back three times, and still nearly went again.