M42 Second Crack... DSS first crack

[stem1989]

First image taken tonight. spent about an hour polar aligning and managed 3 minute subs x 11. only 4 darks, no flats. could do with 'darkening' it up slightly. Stacked in DSS first time using. Improvement is much better. Second image was saturday nights results so happy any more advice on how to better this other than dark skies? the LP areound my yard limits my subs to 2-3mins as I found today.

[WaveSoarer]

That's extremely good. A clear improvement with tonight's image.

[StarRaver]

Good results, could you please state your iso, exposure time etc if thats ok, you should be able to take the red tint out in photoshop or any other editing program which should help darken the sky,

[WaveSoarer]

You could play with the histograms in DSS. This should help with the overall balance of the image and make the dark areas darker etc.

[VigdisVZ]

That looks promising. You should be able to do a whole lot more when working with the settings. Took me a while to get the knack of it, but now it's pretty clear where to begin atleast.

Edit: And with settings I mean the image enhancement ones, histograms and sliders etc after the image has been stacked.

[stem1989]

Good results, could you please state your iso, exposure time etc if thats ok, you should be able to take the red tint out in photoshop or any other editing program which should help darken the sky,

Thanks for the replies I need to have a play around with the settings! that will keep me entertained on the cloudy nights

ISO 1600

Exposures 3x4min, 9x2min 1x1min....4 darks

[Pig]

very nice indeedy.

[NickK]

Possibly:

a) Use a dynamic background extractor - this would remove the background colour.

Use a light pollution filter - this blocks the light from street lights etc.

Here's the result of PixInsight's Dynamic Background Extraction run on your image: