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Despite M42 being a seemingly easy target because its big and bright, its actually one of the harder/hardest to get spot on... due to the massive dynamic range between the trap/core area right out to the dusty Ha regions surrounding M42 and between M42 and the running man, it can be incredibly hard to capture all of that data, then blend it all to evenly expose the whole image...
The 3 best M42's I've seen (which cycle as my desktop backgrounds) Come from Rob Gendler, Greg Bradley and an American photographer (who's name now eludes me) all of these image consist of more than 10 hours exposure, (Rob Gendlers image is 90 hours total exposure!!!!) and have exposure durations of 5sec, 10sec, 20sec, 30sec, 1min, 5min, 10min, 20 min and a few half an hour subs..
Captureing all this data is a MISSION! Processing large sets of data is a whole other world...
Earlier this year I had the lovely idea of attempting this...
I have 60x10sec, 20x30sec, 40x5min, 20x10min and 12x30min exposures of Orion on my hard drive.. Nearly 13hrs total... I've been working on processing these for nearly a month now, and getting nowhere fast...
Dont be too worried if M42 is something that you dont nail in the first season.. From what I'm told, Few people actually NAIL it at all.. Perhaps set your sights on something just as impressive to look at, but with a bit less dynamic range... Eta Carine is the Ultimate southern sky astrophotography schoolground.. Its big, its bright, but the important fact is that its uniformly bright.. not excessively bright in one area, and mind numbingly dim in others... You can run 10x10min subs of Eta and get a great image without all the hastles of M42's painful processing.. I did 25 minute subs on Eta Car about a month and a half ago and did not oversaturate the image anywhere... Fantastic target to learn imaging and processing...
Thats enough out of me.!
Alex.
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