My first attempt at capturing M42. I really messed up my camera rotation thereby clipping off parts of both the Orion Nebula and the Running Man Nebula. Oh well! I still enjoyed this little project. It's only 3 hours of data but took me several days to figure out how to process this image well.
Aquisition: N.I.N.A | PHD2 | Bortle 6-7 | 7% Moon | 180 x 60 sec exposures after culling
Equipment: SVBONY SV503 102ED w/ 0.8 reducer | Juwei 17 mount | Player One Ares-C Pro | SV220 7mm Ha-Oiii filter | Gemini EAF | SV165 30mm guide scope | ZWO 120mm Mini guide cam.
Processing:
Pixinsight – Subframes selected with SFS, stacked with WBPP using x2 drizzle (for stars). No calibration frames were used. GraXpert background extraction, BlurXterminator for star correction and object sharpening, NoiseXterminator, manual histogram to produce 4 seperate stretches differing in stretch intensity, StarNet2 to remove stars nonlinearly at each stretch level (to preserve trapezium cluster) — image brought into Affinity Photo 2 and back — NarrowbandNormalization to help separate the color of the inner nebula from the outer band of Oiii, then using colors masks and curves on each color channel attempted to properly colorize those two elements based on reference images online, DarkStructureEnhance script.
Affinity Photo 2 – Composited all four stretches using the Luminosity Range Mask — image returned to Pixinsight and came back to AP2 after done there — Unsharp mask used bring out dark dust motes in the core, merged the low and high star stretches and the used HSI to shift the teal color of some of the brighter stars to blue, screened the nebula layer onto the new star layer, cropped out stacking artifacts on the edges
More details on handling the high dynamic range of M42 at my Astrobin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/9fvvsu
by Patri_L
1 Comment
So there’s more to that nebula, than just the tripezium in a background haze lol. Great picture! It’s hard to believe when I look at it, i’m missing all that! Thanks for the experience.