M42 - Last of the year?

[Droogie 2001]

My first and probably last M42 image of the year.

Taken with my William Optics Star 71 Astrograph.

This is an uncropped image to give you a sense of the FOV, a cropped view is available on my Flickr account.

I concentrated on trying not to blow the core out so I took a set of 15 second exposures and then masked them into the longer stacked exposure.

18x240 secs

15x30 secs

15x15 secs

Total Imaging time: 83mins (Excluding additional Flats, Darks & BIAS Frames)

All images taken at ISO 800.

I think this is likely to be the last image of the year as the weather looks bad for the next week.
Has been a rotten start to the imaging season. In fact I have had better results in the summer when at least it gave clear skies some of the time…

Thanks for looking.

**Update: The uploaded JPG looks really poor due to additional compression on the image by the Forum software. I have attached a cropped TIFF file to the thread but I cannot get this to paste into the window directly. Does anyone know how to do this?

M42_09.12.15_Cropped.tif

[Stephen Green]

A very nice image

 Stephen

[laudropb]

Very nice image.

[baggywrinkle]

Nice, just wish the rotten skies would clear over Norfolk...

[Droogie 2001]

Thanks for the comments. Even with this image I had to wait until 9pm before I could begin polar alignment. All of my weather apps said it was clear from 5pm onwards however it wasn't down my way. I was close to packing up but knowing that it is probably my only last chance of imaging anything this year I persisted.

The weather or more specifically the cloud cover has been staggering over the last month or two.
Hope 2016 is better in regards to clearer skies!
 

[wimvb]

Very nice one. I took the liberty of downloading the tiff and tweeking it a little in PixInsight. The histogram of the original had the reds at a much lower level. Aligned the RGB histograms, did an HDR transform and increased the saturation somewhat.

Here's my result. It looks ok on my computer, hope the forum software doesn't too much damage to it.

[Droogie 2001]

Thanks Wim. That's looking better. It took me a number of versions to get to where I wanted, so its good to see more detail. Just need to keep at my practising my post processing skills and with the current weather there is plenty of time!