First HDR of M42

[Josh40996]

G'evening

 

Here is my first HDR attempt of the ever popular M42 from the nice orange skies of Greater Manchester. The image is composed of 19 x 90s and 85 x 10s exposures at ISO 1600. Nikon D3200, EQ5 and Astromaster 130. I'm still trying to get exposures longer than 90s, but get trails on anything longer than that... 

 

Thanks

[MarsG76]

nice and deep result...

[rickwayne]

"I got tone!"

-- Maverick

[bottletopburly]

Excellent job well done 

[Pete Presland]

Looks a good first image to me, some very nice detail visible. I am no processing expert, but it does look a bit "noisy" in the fainter edges of the nebula. The core is very nicely exposed, so there is some very good data there. 

What equipment was you using or the captures, are you polar aligning, drift aligning or guiding?

[Josh40996]

Thank you for the comments.

 

5 hours ago, Pete Presland said:

Looks a good first image to me, some very nice detail visible. I am no processing expert, but it does look a bit "noisy" in the fainter edges of the nebula. The core is very nicely exposed, so there is some very good data there. 

What equipment was you using or the captures, are you polar aligning, drift aligning or guiding?

I agree the fainter details are very noisy. I had to massively stretch the data to get it to be visible, much more than I have ever stretched any data, and then used alot of noise reduction in those areas to make it even usable. Then I switched over to Lightroom and used its clarity function to bring back some of the detail there.

 

I polar aligned as best I could with a polar alignment scope, and then I autoguided using a 50mm Guide Scope, an QHY5V-M guide camera. I had to throw away a lot of my 90s subs because of star trails. I was getting a lot of star motion in a back and forth direction. I think if I had more subs I could have controlled the noise a lot better.