First Attempt at Orion Nebula

[Grimmeister (Anthony)]

Hi All,

Had my first crack at the Orion Nebula last night from my Brisbane backyard, a bit of work required to get the Light polution out but all in all quite happy with the outcome.

Looking for some feedback on image processing to get the most out of my data and thoughts from others that have imaged Orion in areas that are bad with LP.

Thnaks in advance for your help.

Anthony

[Poita (Peter)]

Can you give us some info on how you took the images, software used, number of subs, camera, scope mount etc?

Stars look nice and round, a bit of noise in the image but it looks great.

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Fantastic start to imaging M42

You have the wings and outer faint nebula but have not burnt out the core, resulting in the visibility of the Trapezium.
Good sensible balance of High Dynamic Range.

I like it.

[Grimmeister (Anthony)]

Hi Peter and Ken,

I used the following for the imageing; EQ6 Mount, WO ZS70 with Orion Awson Autogiuder (Control was direct to the mount via the autoguider port, Megrez 90 with Canon EOS600D and WO Field Flattener v4, Star Chart and PHD for guiding and mount control.

The image was a combination of 1 * 10 minutes @ ISO100 + 1 * 3 Minutes @ ISO100. I used the second image to overlay the core to bring out the definition as it was well over exposed in the 10 minute image.

I am still learning the photoshop tools and how they work so I couldn't tell you the details of how I processed it afterwards.

I think the noise was because I cropped the main image down to focus on the core of the nebula but will see if I can smooth this out a bit, thanks for highlighting to me I might need to try stacking a few images (I tried Registax but it crashes constantly when doing really large images for some reason "Out of Memory" error). Does the attachment look any better????

As a side note, has anyone used LP filters with success, I was surprised last might by how clear the base image was, I also noticed when trying to image the horse head in the same constelation that it just didn't show up, would an Oiii filter enhance this or was LP my big issue here?

Thanks for the feedback, I just love when things start to come together as I haven't had alot of experience imaging the night sky yet.

Cheers

Anthony

[FlashDrive (Poppy)]

That's real nice for a 1st attempt at photos .... I like it also.

Flash

[irwjager (Ivo)]

That's a truly amazing job for a first time! You really understand the dynamic range problem that M42 poses well and your rendition actually looks quite natural. That's a top job!
I wouldn't really know what to to tell you with regards to improvement (aside from the already mentioned minor noisiness) - I think you nailed it!

Cheers,

[Peter.M]

Something like this, will look very good indeed if you stack far more frames. Deepskystacker is available free and does a very nice job. The noise in the background will decrease with each frame you stack and then you may even be able to stretch out more nebulosity.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Fantastic Anthony!

You've got a lot of potential there! You need to stack a few of the longer subs to improve further - but hey this is a flying start.

Darrin...

[Grimmeister (Anthony)]

Thanks everyone fo rthe positive feedback, I will definitly give Deepskystacker a try for stacking images to see if the noise can be reduced once I have some more images.

With any luck this weekend I will be out at a dark sky and will make sure I get several long exposures and several shorts to capture the trapezium as well.

I will post the results

Cheers

Anthony