M42: Orion Nebula; OSC, 140 min

Acquired using Nikon D7500, AF-P 70-300 DX VR, SkyGuider Pro @300 mm, pixel size of 2.8 arcsec per pixel, f/8 (Dates of 1/5, 1/6, and 2/6 of 2026), 400 @ 15s and ISO 3200, 100 @ 15s and ISO 1600, 50 @ 15s and ISO 800

Stacked and Processed in Siril

Workflow:

Preprocessing: Calibrated some using flats, all using darks and bias; background extraction using graxpert; plate solve; stacked

Processing: Crop, graxpert BG extraction, spectrometric color correction, starnet star removal; stretched w/ GHS, asinh, and black point shifts; HDR compression; reconstructed stars in the star mask; combined starmark and starless images; CLAHE; A trous wavelets; final graxpert denoising.

My thoughts on my image: I think reconstructing the stars may not have worked well, as they look strange, especially on those that have spikes. I need to work on the star processing as this has been giving me a lot of trouble. May have also stretched the core a little too much.