A familiar friend, in the face of the cloud fest, presented as a 1 hour capture

[Astrobdlbug]

Evening all,

 

well without going into a cloud moaning thread - there's one in the Lounge section - in my location it looks like solid red for at least next week - so I am working with even less data than the Horsehead and Pleiades for this image.  I was hoping and should still get more RGB and some L-Extreme Ha for this project over the winter - but as it doesnt look like it will happen any time soon I've processed what meagre data I got last week.
When I was out late on night of 4th/5th November capturing Horsehead data - I could not resist slewing down a bit and taking some subs of M42 Orion Nebula - it always makes me happy to see Orion in the sky and although M42 is so widely imaged - I always love finding something new in the nebula - its easy to get something captured as its such a bright subject , but with so much dust and gas around the dynamic range makes for a real processing challenge and always new techniques to try out.

 

So here we have ASI2600MC (again) and 1 hour of data made up of 30 120s subs plus 7 30s subs to get some HDR to bring out the trapazium

 

Bryan

 

 

[TerryMcK]

Running man looking good too. Excellent image.

[paul]

That's a classic shot, very nice. I haven't been able to image M42 in the last 10yrs since my neighbours grew trees. Now I have some lighter kit I plan to leave the garden and venture down the field this year. (M42 and the horse head if possible). That will be a new experience and stress🙃for me.

Edited November 11, 2021 by paul

[AstronomyUkraine]

Excellent image Bryan. You certainly got the Trapezium under control.

[Astrobdlbug]

13 minutes ago, AstronomyUkraine said:

You certainly got the Trapezium under control.

Masked layers in photoshop is the technique I used the 30s subs and 3 different stretches of the integration creates a nice HDR gradient that can be brushed in - I use a additive method rather than the erase method.

I am much more familiar using this in PS I’ve not used PI for a HDR image.

[AstronomyUkraine]

1 minute ago, Astrobdlbug said:

Masked layers in photoshop is the technique I used the 30s subs and 3 different stretches of the integration creates a nice HDR gradient that can be brushed in - I use a additive method rather than the erase method.

I am much more familiar using this in PS I’ve not used PI for a HDR image.

I believe the HDR Composition is a great tool for this type of image, even better if coupled with the HDRMultiScaleTransform process. Unfortunately I can't put this to the test, I have no decent view South.

[MarkAR]

Lovely image, seen some vids on HDR combination in Pixinsight to get really good core results. It's so bright you could easily cut exposure time right down to around 10 seconds or maybe even less depending on your camera.