Hi All,
Tim's recent posts of a couple of images around Orion brought to memory a data set that I had not published. I produced this in collaboration with an fine arts student in the US who later went on to display his rendition of the image along with other photographs in a few exhibitions. Due to this I was not able to release the image for a period of time, in fact the data was acquired back in 2010. I think this is the first or second time I've posted what I call a 'half baked' image. It has no colour so in my mind its not finish, that however was the intent of the project - to show M42 a completely different way. I have considered following this up with colour data but lacking inspiration for doing so. There are plenty of great M42 colour images out there yet very few show the immense structure and beauty at 4.8m of focal length. Given this is a nine panel mosaic, we were able to capture significant detail with an adequately sized field of view. For your viewing pleasure, the largest resolution is nearly 3k x 3k.
M42 in Ha
Processed in CCDStack, MaximDL and Photoshop. I was tasked come up with the mosaic plan (attached for reference) and acquire the data. Guidestar selection wasn't too much of an issue as can be seen in the plan. Working with monochrome data made panel stitching a breeze compared to chroma. I did not perform any selective masking to darken the core. In hindsight, that may have been a good idea to bring out even more detail but I wanted to keep core brightness relative to the surrounds and lets face it, its a freaking bright nebula to be seen with the unaided eye. Optical reflection and star flares all add to the raw nature of the data. Chasing them for correction I felt wasn't worth the effort. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this out of season image.
Cheers