In 2009 I moved house, it is a great house but very impractical for astrophotography, before I moved it was on an EQ6 with an astro-modded Canon 1000D through a WO FLT98 CF, no computer, no guiding, spent a lot of time at setup drift aligning for polar alignment, was happy if 180 seconds would hold, new house had limited sky views, mostly to west where bright streetlights were. Decided to retire from astrophotography and just focus on ordinary photography
Through COVID couldn’t travel and ordinary photography lapsed and got the astrophotography itch again. A quick perusal of what people were doing at the time made me realise with a whole bunch of new equipment I could do decent astrophotography again. The final piece was the ASI 2600MC astro camera I got for Xmas. Mount is Ioptron CEM70, am guiding now, DSS is mostly the same as 2009 and I have reasonable photoshop skills. Polar alignment is so much easier now. After the ASI 2600MC I thought ditch the computer, get an EAF and go ASIAIR Plus. In light polluted suburbia with streetlights of course needed a dual narrowband filter. I can see most people don’t use photoshop as main image modifying software now so I gave Startools a quick try, I then had to watch a number of videos and read quite a lot to see why my new images were so bad……I then revisited Startools and came up with this, 30 x2min subs at low gain -10 degrees. I think focus became softer during imaging, seeing was below average, a bit windy, guiding not great…….core not resolved as much as i would like…..but for first crack at M42 in more than 13 years it brought a smile to my face, I have included a M42 from 2009 by comparison (my monitor from then clearly was not purple calibrated well)
One of the benefits of COVID. people slowed down and looked up. Lovely image. It must be daunting coming back after such a long time away. Look forward to seeing more of you pics.
For your first image in so long, that's very good. The core is a bit blown out, but you have managed to capture a lot of the shadows and detail in the nebula - top stuff.
