My Contribution to the Festive M42s

[old_eyes]

I had another good night recovering my imaging skills on 28th with M42 as the subject. Equinox 80, Canon 1000D, 20 frames each from 2sec to 300sec at ISO 800.

I used the HDR tool in PixInsight using this tutorial.

I like it. I am not sure I believe all that brown stuff near the Running Man, but this is definitely the best image I have created of M42. Not what it looks like through the eyepiece, but revealing a lot more detail than previous attempts.

What does everyone else think? Good, bad, meh? I have kept the processing to the minimum steps so it is possible I might be able to do more with this, but happy the way it is.

Happy New Year all!

[Adam J]

31 minutes ago, old_eyes said:

I had another good night recovering my imaging skills on 28th with M42 as the subject. Equinox 80, Canon 1000D, 20 frames each from 2sec to 300sec at ISO 800.

I used the HDR tool in PixInsight using this tutorial.

I like it. I am not sure I believe all that brown stuff near the Running Man, but this is definitely the best image I have created of M42. Not what it looks like through the eyepiece, but revealing a lot more detail than previous attempts.

What does everyone else think? Good, bad, meh? I have kept the processing to the minimum steps so it is possible I might be able to do more with this, but happy the way it is.

Happy New Year all!

Very nice, I recon that the brown stuff is likely correct, what I am curious about is the rainbow in the bottom left corner.

[old_eyes]

That rainbow has to be an optical artefact, but I don't know where it is coming from.

[ollypenrice]

Asked to look carefully at this, I'd say first off that it's very good and core control around the Trapezium is fine. The first thing I see is unwanted green. Either Hasta la Vista Green or SCNR Green in PI would sort that in an instant. There is plenty of brown dust around the Running Man and, indeed, within this framing outside the main nebulae. In truth there would be a lot more if you went for it! I don't see anything to doubt, here, other than the 'rainbow.'

This is a popular but hard target and I think this is a good version.

Olly

[old_eyes]

Thanks Olly. I tried to stretch the image further, but you quickly get into the noise. I can see more nebulosity, but it is overlaid on a lot of noise so aestetically not too attractive.

I used SCNR and it looks like it has removed a significant green cast (i had completely forgotten that tool  ). I also nudged the saturation up a bit to strengthen the nebula colour. This is where I have got to so far.

[wimvb]

Great image of this difficult (!) target. I think that a touch of DBE and MaskedStretch can lift it even more.

Thanks for sharing

[old_eyes]

Wim,

DBE was applied to each combined exposure length image before HDR processing, as in the tutorial. Can I use DBe on the combined image? Worth an experiment anyway.

MaskedStretch I had never heard of and will certainly have a go with.

Thanks.

[laudropb]

Very nice image.

[wimvb]

DBE can be applied at any point while the image is linear (unstretched). Usually it is applied directly after cropping stacking artefacts, before any other process, because most processes are affected by an uneven background.

Masked stretch is a good way to keep stars under control and get a better colour saturation.

[old_eyes]

Thanks Wim. Will post image using this approach once I get a chance to reprocess.