New attempt on an old friend. Succes!

[Bignerdguy]

OK so i have been doing this astrophotography for a few years and until today i was never really satisfied with my images of DSO's.  I do like my planetary and solar photos, but i could never seem to get the Taking of the photos right where DSO's were concerned.  Well today that ends!. I managed to get a REALLY good shot of the Orion Nebula with my setup with a few new pieces of hardware and a lot more knowledge of how to take and process the photos.  Granted i am still not 100% happy with the colors but i think that has more to do with the fact i am using a FS modded canon camera and a light pollution filter.  I took the below photo in Bortle 9+ skies and this is only about roughly 50+ minutes of images.  I have an entire week this week to take more and i plan to put that to good use getting all sorts of photos.   I took 60x 60 second subs and discarded about 5-7 of them due to smearing artifacts.  I was guiding and i think the smearing came when the guider didn't recover from the download delay fast enough on a few shots.  I should point out that i tried to use EQMOD this evening and had issues with the guide function so switched back to running through the hand controller since that i knew worked fine.  All in all this was one of my best sessions to date, barring the solar ones i did not that long ago.  Cant wait to do it again.

[TiffsAndAstro]

Really nice and plenty of dust too.

 

Edge stacking artefacts may inhibit gradient removal though? 

[Bignerdguy]

Actually i enhanced the brightness a bit much to bring out the dust so it might be showing a bit more of the light pollution that didn't get eliminated by my filter and what processing i did.  I also noticed the slight corruption on the left and bottom edge and cropped that in a new version.  The flats did take care of the gradient though since it was WAY worse than what you see here but yeah, it could do with a bit more processing.  i am still feeling my way around PixInsight, its really a complex program.   I plan to take more photos tonight and try to combine them with this one.  

Edited yesterday at 17:33 by Bignerdguy

[ollypenrice]

For me, the next step would be to take some short subs, 10 seconds or so, for the Trapezium and to use a High Dynamic Range routine to blend them in. You wouldn't need many subs because the region is so bright that noise is minimal. 

I don't see any residual gradient in this image.

Olly

[Paul M]

I'm a romantic so gravitated towards, the "Old Friend" phrase in your title

I'll offer no technical critique, but my own thoughts are that you've done our old friend proud! Like going through an old family album, I rarely find fault with the photography, just take in the subject.

Perhaps in this technical age, where some quite spectacular images are acquired by hobbyists with back yard scopes, the old favorites end up being overcooked rather than overdone. What I see here is a classic M42, as I fondly remember it. Not Jarring to the eye, or unrecognizable. Just how I like to see old friends,  no Turkey teeth, botox or trout pout! 🙊🙉🙈 😁