Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Orion (Ori)  ·  Contains:  41 Ori A)  ·  41 Ori C  ·  41 Ori D  ·  41 the01 Ori  ·  42 Ori)  ·  42 c Ori  ·  43 Ori)  ·  44 Ori)  ·  44 iot Ori  ·  45 Ori  ·  Great Orion Nebula  ·  HD294129  ·  HD294130  ·  HD294131  ·  HD294132  ·  HD294133  ·  HD294134  ·  HD294135  ·  HD294140  ·  HD294141  ·  HD294146  ·  HD294147  ·  HD294148  ·  HD294149  ·  HD294150  ·  HD294151  ·  HD294167  ·  HD294168  ·  HD294169  ·  HD294170  ·  And 236 more.
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M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore
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M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore
Powered byPixInsight

M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings

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Description

I've imaged M42 every year in my relatively short astrophotography journey, improving each time I think. This year I wanted to get a fairly wide field view bringing out the surrounding dust and other reflection nebulosity. To do so required a 2 panel mosaic. 

I took a fair amount of time processing, despite use of all of RCs toolset.  Dynamic Background Extraction had to be done very carefully to try and avoid the dust. HDR processing was used, combining an image based on 2 second exposures with the main image of 20 second exposures, and I tried a few options to get to my preferred result (core not over-exposed, but still very bright, so that the image doesn't look flat). And there was a fair amount of using masks of different types with some of the stretching and when lightly saturating the colours.

Revision C is a complete re-process. In particular, I realised that the bright area off to the left of M42 was a caused by the target image gradient processing in PI's Photometric Mosaic, which had been confused by the bright nebula in the join area. So this was re-run without this option, having also reworked my DBE following the starless technique I now use. This time I also ran HDRMultiscaleTransform while using a very small range mask to just cover the very bright core of M42. This avoids the flattening out of the whole nebula, which is an effect that I don't particularly like.

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Revisions

  • M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore
    Original
  • M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore
    B
  • Final
    M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore
    C

B

Description: slight push to contrast

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C

Description: Re-processed correcting Mosaic gradient issues

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Sky plot

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M42 Great Orion Nebula with dusty surroundings, Robin Livermore

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