M42 with an 8" Dob at prime focus

[Kon]

I have attempted to image M42 using by 8" Dob without tracking. I think I am quite please with the result but it is a far cry from the beautiful images I have seen here. I used a Nikon D3200 (iso 1600) on prime focus and stacked 40 frames (0.625 s per frame) in siril. I did some basic stretching in Gimp. If any of you thinks that you might be able to get something more from my data, I have uploaded the tiff from siril.

orion-best.tif

[Louis D]

I messed around with it in my ancient copy of Photoshop Elements and came up with the following:

[Sunshine]

Pardon my meddling with your photo, especially not being an imager but, as a photographer I had give it a shot. You've done an impressive job considering the scope definitely not designed for taking such an image!

Edited February 11, 2021 by Sunshine

[Kon]

@Louis D and @Sunshine thank you both on taking a look! Much more improved than my attempt!! It was an impromptu session after my visual. I would like to add more shots to it and do the blanks etc for the noise reduction. I may have to drop the iso since it is quite noisy.

[peter shah]

that's impressive  taken with a Dob

[Louis D]

There was very little signal in the red channel to work with, so I think your DSLR's built-in UV/IR filter is being too aggressive and is clipping the H-alpha line as shown below:

Compare my results with your image versus one taken with a QHY168C camera in this thread:

Notice how much more red channel signal I was able to dredge up from the before image in the after image.

Before:

After:

You may want to get your DSLR astro-modded to make it full spectrum if you want to dedicate it to astrophotography.