First success with M42

[Filroden]

Well, tonight I finally captured an image of M42 I want to share. It's a 60 x 8 sec ISO 1600 stack processed in Photoshop only using 10 darks and no flats. It's taken on a Celestron Evolution 9.25 with a Canon 60d so the field of view is narrow. I do have an f6.7 reducer but I'm struggling with vingnetting so I've gone with this limited shot.

What more should I next do to improve this?

 

[richyrich_one]

That's some excellent detail in the core.

Flats! Flats! Flats!

[hjw]

Hi Filroden,

it's not a bad start and I can still vividly recall the thrill of seeing M42 on the screen for the first time - almost two years ago. What you need to do to improve is to extend the exposure time, of each frame and overall. I think I started with 10 and 30sec frames and worked myself up. In my latest effort I used 3 hours worth of 5 minute exposures and realized there are some faint dust clouds around the nebula. 3 hours was not enough. Well, there is always next year. To get to these kind of exposure times you need a motorized equatorial mount and guiding. But there will be several shades of grey in between. See how long you can push the exposure time before the field rotation kicks in. Even if you can get 20 sec it would make a big difference. Flats, as mentioned before will help with the vignetting.

Good luck and enjoy the ride!

HJ

[PeterCPC]

The answer to getting good imaging is getting lots of data. Longer exposures will help enormously. When I had an Alt/Az I could generally do 30 secs exposures for M42 without trailing, and do lots of them. Still a great image though - stick at it.

Peter

[ollypenrice]

It's very finely resolved with an excellent trapezium. For this part of the nebula, which is very bright, I don't think you'll need very long exposures but try to make some longer ones. You can then blend them with the shorter ones using layer masking.

A low noise way to boost colour in Ps is:

Make two copy layers.

Set top layer to blend mode soft light and flatten onto middle layer. Maybe add a slight Gaussian blur (O.5 ish.)

Set this to blend mode colour and flatten onto bottom layer.

Olly

[Filroden]

Thank you all for the tips. I'll try some longer exposures but I find I get too many poor images if I go beyond 10 seconds. I'm going to give 15 and 20 second subs a try. If I do enough I should get enough useable data. 

Ill give the processing tip a try tonight. I'm only using levels, curves and vibrancy so far. 

On flats, is it possible to do these retrospectively? If so, how? It's the one type of shot in having trouble building into my routine as I can't find a way to do it at the same time as my lights and darks. During setup I use an eyepiece to better align the mount and I don't have a flat enough light source to do it after set up. Ideally I'd like to do them before dusk but I can't see how I can do that, then use an eyepiece for alignment, then replace the camera in the same alignment. 

I guess I could do the setup fully through live view?

[laudropb]

Nice image, especially in the core.

[Filroden]

Although I've not been able to take more subs yet, I have tried to apply the advice on processing the image. Although very noisy, there is definitely more I can do with the existing subs. Here's hoping for a clear evening tomorrow.