Image Processing Needed

[Arran townsend]

Hi all, I'm new to imaging and I have recently been imaging the Orion Nebula, I have processed the image but it didn't come out all that well, there was a lot of noise and there was absolutely no colour in the image at all, I was hoping someone else could process the image for me, so I can see what can be achieved with professional dedicated processing.  

orion nebula 320mm.TIF

[bobro]

It's great that you are asking for assistance processing the image, though it's a challenging one. It can be useful to explain how an image was taken (equipment, number of exposures, exposure time etc) and how the image was processed (software, techniques etc) as this sets the scene for the image.

[Arran townsend]

1 hour ago, bobro said:

It's great that you are asking for assistance processing the image, though it's a challenging one. It can be useful to explain how an image was taken (equipment, number of exposures, exposure time etc) and how the image was processed (software, techniques etc) as this sets the scene for the image.

I took the image with a 200mm lens at 1.6" exposures around 200-500 exposures I'm not sure, at iso 1600, they are untracked using a tripod with heavy light pollution

[bobro]

Very short exposures combined with a bright sky will produce a lot of noise. Not sure what you mean by 'recently', but the Orion nebula is typically a winter target as the sky is bright at this time of year. A bright sky will wash out fainter parts of the target.

There looks to be brightness steps in your image - were the subs taken as jpegs? Raw mode needs to be used to allow stretching without obvious steps showing.

Info attached to the image shows it was saved with settings applied. You could repost it without settings applied to see if anyone is willing to try and process the image.

The zenith normally has the darkest sky. Plus, if you have a shorter focal length lens this will allow longer exposures before trailing starts. If your tripod/mount is suitable, attaching even a simple RA motor would help with exposure length.

The 'No EQ' thread might be of interest to you as an alt/az mount means that only shorter exposures can be used :

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/228101-the-no-eq-dso-challenge/

Hope this helps.