Helping Hubble why waiting for clear skies

[gorann]

Or, why not steal some Hubble data to improve your images?

While waiting for clear skies (today we got 20 cm of snow), I have like apparently many other Stargazers played around with old data. After realizing that I could not do much more to improve my latest M42 image, and trying to get inspiration from the numerous M42s published on the net, I stumbled on what Wikipedia says is "one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced: NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope version of the M42 that took 105 Hubble orbits to complete. Even if it is a mosaic, it is far from capturing the whole nebula and the Running man is way out of reach. So, I decided to join forces with NASA and ESA and expland their field of view a bit. It was also a good Photoshop exercise for me.

Here is my latest version of M42 and the Running man.

Here is the Hubble M42

And here they are living together in perfect (?) harmony

[gorann]

What I meant to call the thread was: Helping Hubble WHILE waiting for clear skies

(Apparently I am not allowed to edit the heading)

[StargeezerTim]

Interesting!

What strikes me is that the images we produce of M42 on this forum are not a million miles off of the Hubble image. Hubble is obviously much more detailed (and so it should be!) but it is amazing what we can produce for a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of Hubbles costs...

[gorann]

Yes, I was also struck by the fact that the difference was not as great as I would have thought, and it is great that we do not need to spend US$10 billion to get some rather amazing images. As, you say the detail is of course much better in the Hubble images but that is not so obvious until you zoom in.

Actually, some of us probably reach the same level of detail when doing major widefield mosaics, like Tom and Olly's Orion:

http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/237263-the-400-hour-image/?hl=%2Borion+%2Bmosaic

or Tom's recent galactic centre:

(http://stargazerslounge.com/topic/259691-100hr-galactic-centre-mosaic