Orion (again!)

A much clearer night last night, so I set up the AZ mount on the windowsill again, set the camera up with my 70-200mm and pointed it at The Orion Nebula (M42) and The Running Man (NGC 1977).

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I captured this target before a few weeks ago and was really pleased with the result, but I managed much longer integration (exposure) last night and was zoomed right in at 200mm too. In all I ended up with over 230 frames at 45secs, but had to bin some because of a few with star trails and others with cloud. So it was whittled down to 170, just over 2 hours, with another 140 calibration frames.

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I set about stacking and processing today and pulled out even more data than I’ve ever managed in any image. The colour in this pic is genuine – no overpainting, just adjustments of Hue and Saturation. So colour boost, not colour creation!

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I think this is the best shot I’ve achieved so far and it shows that the more data you collect (total integration), the easier it is to pull detail out with less processing. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still quite a lot of processing work in this, but I was able to get this result much quicker and easier than if it had been half an hour of integration.

Nebulae are clouds of gas and dust. M42 is the brightest nebula in the sky and its actually where new stars are being formed. The colourful areas are ionised gas, emitting its own light and the deep black areas are dust clouds.

I can’t un-see a little racing driver in an old-fashioned white crash helmet on the left of the nebula! Maybe he’s racing against The Running Man above!

The AZ Mount again worked really well. It tracked the target really accurately and apart from a few frames, stars were sharp and round (no trailing). There was also no noticeable problem with the lack of rotation – Deep Sky Tracker rotated each frame by tiny amounts to line up all the images in the stack.

It’s the processing techniques that really count in this Astro lark! There are techniques to pull every little pixel of info’ out of the data, others to improve the sky background and best of all, to remove the stars completely! Might sound mad, but it means you can work on bringing out Nebula information etc without over-blowing the bright stars. Once done, the stars can be treated separately and placed back over the rest of the image!

I think I’m going to do a post on the processing techniques soon.