Here’s an M42 from earlier this week.
On Monday night, with a very bright moon I took some Ha shots. M42 can be quite a tricky target because there’s such a difference in brightness between the centre and outlying areas, so this is a mix of 1 and 10 min exposures with the Ha filter. Unfortunately the clouds were rolling over quite frequently, and of 15 10 mins shots, only 3 were actually usable- this has given me a very noisy Ha channel to work with.
I had a bit more luck on Thursday night, before the moon came up, capturing 1 and 5 min exposures with the IDAS filter that I use to suppress the bright LED lights. Merging mixed exposure times is a new technique for me, so I’m quite pleased with how it has come out. The trapezium can’t quite be seen, but there’s still a reasonable amount of detail in the bright sections that surround it. The hardest bit was reducing the noise in the final colour image- I’ve lost a bit of detail doing this. Ah well- gives me something to aim for next year…
18/2/19 – Ha – 30x 1 mins, 3x 10 mins
21/2/19 – RGB – 12x1mins, 54x 5mins
My M42 was with GIMP. ’tis FREE!
ARHH!
Pigs in sight is a program I don’t have (can’t afford it and too complicated)
Geoff
The M42 at the end of this post:
https://roslistonastronomy.uk/sword-of-orion-31-10-2018
was actually 4 separate exposures. I found 2 weren’t enough. 3 would probably be OK with a bit of fiddling about. Mind you, it was from the window-sill!
That’s very nice Rob. You’ll have to show me how to do the mixing of the images some time.
Geoff
Thanks Geoff. I’m using Pixinsight for these and it has some special processes for integrating different exposures and then processing High Dynamic Range objects. More than happy to show you hoe it works (although I often need to refer to the instructions myself! Intuitive it is not…)