I think my astrophotography has gone leaps and bounds in the past month. From simple, really cruddy photos, to something I think I can FINALLY show here in the Big Boy forum
Hard to believe this is merely a stack of 5 (yes 5!) lights, ISO 400 / 180 secs. Guided by an Orion Starshoot. 2 darks, 2 flats. Stacked them in DSS, adjusted significantly from the initial output in DSS, and minor tweaking in PS 5.1 and a litl in StarTools. Canon 5DMkII, totally unmodified and not cooled (my peltier failed - rebuilding it), with APT controlling. CMOS temp did not exceed 21° last night even once - it was a PERFECT seeing night here on the Sunshine Coast, QLD - I have not seen a night like it in MONTHS. Tonight may be the same - hope to add astack more data for NGC 6726 (R Corona Australis) and M 42 - maybe a stack of 30 for M42.
I love the dust lanes and the amount of white cloud nebulosity a lot of people unfortunately edit out - I think it needs to be there to show the true MASSIVE extent of the Orion complex. I plan doing a complete Orion mosaic eventually (got my first truly successful Horsehead shots last night)
Anyway, let me know what you think, how to imrove etc. Adding more exposures will help eradicate a bit of the noise - denoising it removes too much detail at this low stack count. I will throw the full image on my webpage later to show it as compared to the lossy preview here.
Constructive criticism GREATLY appreciated!
http://imageshack.us/a/img84/6476/m42ea.png