M42 taken at IISAC 2011

[vic4loc]

Had a short but great time at IISAC. Arrived late on Sat, setup the scope and did some visual for about 1 hr, then the cloud came over. As soon as I finished packing my gear, the sky cleared to a brilliant night.

Took this M42, and did some basic stacking/processing with my limited photoshop knowledge. Turned out quite well I believe.

Scope: LX90 8"
Mount: HEQ5, unguided
Camera: Canon 550D un-modded

10x45sec ISO1600
10x15sec ISO1600 for the core data

Stacked in DSS, further processing with Photoshop CS5

[jjjnettie]

:D beaut detail Victor
I'm glad someone got some real imaging done.

[Osirisra]

nice shot, has ton of data in there.

[irwjager]

Love that trapezium Victor. As Ken says, there's quite a bit of data in the 10x45 seconds that isn't utilized. Lovely trapezium in its own right though! :thumbsup:

[vic4loc]

Thanks all for the feedbacks. Great to see some of the improvements :) I did initially stretched the levels in photoshop, but saw the additional noise in the pic, so decided to go with the reduced details.

Victor.

[Ross G]

Nice shot Victor.

It has nice details from faint to bright.

Ross.

[midnight]

I had a similar problem too Victor with mine. I was a bit wary in stretching too far.

But a nice image and as the others say there is plenty of data there.

Good luck with future attempts!

Darrin...

[DavidTrap]

I just can't believe how great your stars are for an unguided image at 2000mm focal length!

Well done!!!!!

DT