M42 First Attempt

[HumanEnergy]

Technically it's actually my second attempt, but my first was so poor I didn't bother posting it!

Sony Alpha 55 camera attached directly to a 5 inch Celestron mak on a Celestron CG5 mount.

40 thirty second exposures at ISO 800 and 20 dark frames. I left all the settings in Deep Sky Stacker on defaults and then messed with the result in Photoshop Elements 9 (with a helping hand from the astronomy tools plugins). Not 100% sure what I was doing with the levels dialogue but I winged it until things were looking good

Tighter crop

[jasperuk]

Nice shot and my favourite target as well

[Stargazer33]

Looks good to me! Nice image.