Orion Nebula (M42)

Target: Orion Nebula (M42)
Date: January 17, 2024
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Clear skies, 23-44°F, Wind: 10-15 mph, Moon: 8% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5
Integration: 360 x 60 seconds

I was so happy with my earlier results of the Orion Nebula with my Dwarf 3 that I grabbed my ASI533MC Pro and 60EDR telescope and tried another night of imaging. This time I dithered my Sky-watcher SA GTi so I could drizzle the data during stacking. I lost some time since the SA GTi takes so long to settle, but I was left with 6 hours of usable integration. 

I opted for my optolong L-eNhance to do some narrowband imaging which worked extremely well. I was able to easily extract the Ha and OIII with DBXtract and recombined with the Foraxx Utility and Narrowband Normalization.

The color palette is pretty over the top, but I wanted to create something that really popped as I want to print this on a 20×30 acrylic. Please let me know what you think of the color and/or anything you would change or suggest before printing.

Post-Processing Workflow

Software Used: PixInsight

1. Stacked in PixInsight with WBPP.
2. Dynamic Cropped Image.
3. Applied Seti Astro's AutoDBE.
4. Applied BlurXTerminator at default values.
5. Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
6. Applied NoiseXTerminator at 70% on starless image.
7. Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
8. Used MAS to stretch extracted images.
9. Combined Ha & OIII with Foray Palette Utility.
10. Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
11. Created Blue and Yellow masks.
12. Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
13. Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
14. Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.40 and SCNR checked.
15. Combined starless with star images with image blend script.
16. Exported as PNG.