Another HDR M42...First roughs no darks bias flats as they are in the house..

[Psychobilly]

My 2nd attempt of the year on M42 - used it to finish the nights testing of the ETX105 guiding my CPC800XLT off...fighting Luna and contrails so had to piuck something bright to image through til dawn broke...

5x2s 5x5s 5x10s 5x20s 5x40s 5x80s 4x160s no darks bias flats (forgot to bring them into work with me) stacked using my HDR method...

This should get a lot better tonight when i get to work on it properly.. the poor old Core Duo lappy is strugglign with all that data and im losing patience waiting for it...so no curves etc just the basics

(click to enlarge)

Billy...

[jgs001]

Looks very good Billy. What's your HDR method ?

[Psychobilly]

Looks very good Billy. What's your HDR method ?

1. You stack the individual sets of subs in DSS

2. you equalise the background level of all the resulting stacks

3. you add the individual stacks as layers in CS shortest exposure on top longest on bottom

4. you manually align the layers

5. you lock the position of each layer as its aligned

6. you adjust the opacity of each layer to be 1/n th - so 5 layers 1/5 = 20% etc

7. you save the file in a multilayer format

8. Copy merge the layers into a new file and then do all the usual stuff...

Thats it really ....

This has been a quick and dirty HDR stack will do it properly tonight when I get home...

Billy...

[jgs001]

Thanks Billy, and you make it sound so simple

[CELESCOPE]

Nice result Billy . the core looks good as well , good old M42 ,its going to take a real bashing this year , funny i think i only done one image of that last year , and Billy there are some good nebs around Orion,

Rog

[trudie]

That is great result, nice one Billy.

Trudie

[Psychobilly]

Thanks all

But hopefully it will look a lot better this evening...once bias and darks are included in the processing....

Billy...

[Psychobilly]

Dozed off at the keyboard lastnight dreaming of a Megrez 72 to replace the damaged Equinox 66 .. so I didn't get round to re-processing the data

Heres the first attempt....

(click to enlarge)

Not happy with it had to get ridy of the reflection artefacts and its a bit noisy and can't decide on colouring.... looks way to overprocessed... but the other data is in work ARRRGHHH!!

Will have to wait for a moon free night next time I think...

Billy...

[mik]

Looking good Billy

Mick

[kev 102 42]

not bad butt

[LostNSpace]

Lovely M42 Billy......both images look great, to me anyways.......nice colours and plenty of detail.........

good job

Mark

[glennbech]

Excellent result Billy; Don't be too hard on yourself, it looks great! Just look at the level of detail in the red parts south east of the core.

I think the problem with M31, M45, M42 etc is that we set our expectations very high. The objects are imaged a lot and there are some incredible images out there. I once saw a M31 image collected over an entire season; hundreds of hours of exposures. Narrow band images were blended in as well to highlight Ha regions.

How do you compete with that? :-.)

[anthony]

The calibration has brought about a considerable change. Excellent image - really smooth and I like the rich colouring

Anthony

[barkis]

You're quite tough on yourself Billy. I think most of us would be quite happy with these images.

However, being the person you are, you will do it all over again.

I the next session on M42 is to your satisfaction.

Ron.

[Psychobilly]

Thanks all fro your comments..

Next time its going to be imaged at ISO200 or 400 as its such a bright object anyway so should have much more color to play with...and I'll also do more shrter subs for each stack which should smooth it more again.

I know the plethora of M42 images has been discussed elsewhere ... but why not keep revisiting it as its an extremeley interesting object which can produce such a variety of different images depending on the processing techniques that are used...

Billy...

I terms of grabinng dtaa M42 id so quick just got a few "HDR" sequences setup in DSLRFocus...

[Sam]

It's a very good capture of M42 there Billy. Though M42 is imaged frequently it's a tricky one to get the faint detail because of the brightness of some parts of it.

[narrowbandpaul]

m42 what a special object...i never tire of seeing or imaging it, regardless of what neil bone thinks!

great image psycho

will be nice to see it at a lower ISO....

Good luck

Paul

[MartinB]

Good work Billy. On the first one you can easily make out the stars within the trapezium along with the faint outer stuff so your HDR method is working well.

[RobH]

A fine image Billy, and very nicely processed. The colours are great and your focus is very tight, lots of detail showing.

I take it the artifact in the first image is the horseshoe nebula

Cheers

Rob

[Psychobilly]

Lol Rob...

I left it there hoping someone would tell me where its likely to be coming from.....

There are alos several other fainter ones across the image...

Setup is CPC 800 Hutech Idas P2 in Borg SCT adaptors on Rear port then Celestron F6.3 Reducer ,55 mm SCT -T Adaptor ,T mount and Canon 350D (with filter removed)

Anyone got any ideas please ....

Focus is down to the Drain cover masks... and the guiding was through the ETX 105 at f15 so 1500mm guiding 1278mm

Hopefully the Megrez 72 arrives tomorrow

Billy...

[gary1968]

Great image Billy.

Gary

[Psychobilly]

Thanks for the comments... and as others have said were all out own worst critics... I know theres so much more to come out of M42/M43 this season so "Bo.....s" to NB there are going to be more M42's before the seasons out but only if I feel they are an improvement over my previous efforts...

I have some more tweaks to the stacking method I am using planned I have experimented with them but want some new data to play with before I post the results...

Billy...