M42 in HOO

[glowingturnip]

Here's my first attempt at bi-colour HOO narrowband, using the OIII filter I got for Christmas

Please do click through to Flickr and have a look at it with the magnifying glass, there's loads of detail in there.

23x600s Ha, 20x60s Ha, 10x600s OIII, 8x60s OIII, darks, flats and bias, equipment as per sig, Pixinsight.

 

It was an absolute joy to process this, it was singing to me from the very first trial combination of stacks.  I had lots of fun playing with colour balances (actually it's more like HOo, and then I let the red grow a bit, looks like a watermelon to me).  Had fun with the HDR too.  I've done some HaLRGB before, and I have the skies for it, but I'm finding HaLRGB to be quite frustrating - takes ages to process to get the balance right, and even then it seems to be a compromise between the detail of the Ha and the colours of the RGB, and all too often, it comes out like a big red smudge.  I've got a Pacman in processing that might just end up left on the cutting room floor.

It seems I've finally tamed my collimation and coma demons, but on this occasion, my guiding was surprisingly shocking.  I normally get something like 0.45" rms error, but this time was as much as 2.5".  We'd had near-gales the few days before I took this, and while it was calm at ground level on the nights I was capturing, I guess it was still hurtling around in the upper atmosphere - pretty twinkling stars, and a rather less pretty guide star bouncing around all over the place in PHD.  I had to throw away nearly half of my OIII because the stars were too fat, as you can tell from the capture details above.

 

Just for a laugh, here is my first attempt, taken 6 years ago with an unmodded DSLR - a shamefully small set of data (ahem, 13x10s !) and processed within an inch of its life (I think this was about the 4th reprocess), but not a bad attempt I suppose.

 

Anyway, hope you enjoy, comments and cc welcome !

Cheers,

Stuart

[MikeODay]

Wonderful image - I like the unusual colour.

[MeyGray3833]

It's a great object, isn't it?

I like the HOO, looks reasonably natural and I do like your older image, too!

[glowingturnip]

thanks both  :-)

[swag72]

I think that the colour and data here looks very good. ????

[Paul73]

Love the way that the dust jumps out. A really nice contrast!

Paul

[glowingturnip]

thank you, I'm very pleased with this one, probably my best yet, even though it's such a done-over target !  Onwards and upwards

[StargeezerTim]

Nice one Stuart... I must get myself an Oiii filter. There's nothing laughable about your first attempt either, Its a nice image.

If you really want a laugh, here is my first attempt at Orion.