A sure sign that winter is just around the corner. Orion was rising in the SE and, for once, I had clear stable skies down to the horizon so I thought I would chance my arm and have a go at my first M42 this "season".

I used a Canon EOS 400D SLR attached at prime focus to a Meade 8" SCT via a f/6.3 focal reducer. Focussing was achieved using a Hartmann mask. The trick with this image was to take multiple timed exposures, and combine them into a single image then bring out the features, in a balanced way across the entire image, using Photoshop. The shorter exposures allowed some detail in the Trapezium area to be captured while the long exposures favoured the wispy structures in the nebula itself.

Exposures were 2 x 15s, 1 x 30s, 1 x 45s, 1 x 60s at ISO 1600. RAW images were converted to 16-bit TIF and processed using Photoshop CS and NeatImage.

Cheers

Eric

Attached Images

m42-111107-eab.jpeg (140.9 KB, 56 views)

Beautiful! Yes, winter is arriving for us here in the north. Orion is rising around 9:00 PM here, with Bellatrix leading the way.

Very very Nice Eric!, lots of effort with great results. Welldone and clear skies

Good work Eric.

Summer is arriving here in Australia and Orion is rising in the east around 9:30pm. Here is my first attempt this year, using a 400D with a 200mm lens piggybacked on a C8. This is a stack of 200 20 second exposures!

I don't know how to capture the detail in the dimmer parts of the nebula without saturating the core. How do you combine exposures with different exposure times?



clop

Hi Clop

I use Registax, a free bit of software which is very easy to use. There are plently of people who use it and there are many articles on the internet to help you out. You can find it here http://www.astronomie.be/registax/

Nice capture of the Running Man nebula (NGC 1977) by the way.

Eric