M42 - The Orion Nebula
It’s “Orion Season” and everyone seems to be posting images of this iconic DSO. I would have joined the crowd a while ago except for the simple fact that I can’t see Orion above next door’s roof until this time of year.
After capturing a fantastic image of the Tarantula the other night, I was looking for a new target to image. Most of the ones I wanted to try were either blocked by buildings, or were not going to rise above the horizon for a few hours. A couple that I tried were simply too small to properly image from my back yard. From a dark sky site I would have a much better chance of imaging them and capturing all the tiny details. Maybe when I can get away to the LMDSS again, I will have a crack at them.
As for this image, I don’t think it needs much introduction - just about everyone can recognise the Orion constellation and will have seen images of the nebula that makes up one of the “stars” on Orion’s Sword.
One thing that has appeared in my images are horizontal bands of noise. Unfortunately, I broke the golden rule of trouble shooting - only make one change at a time! I changed the white balance of my camera and installed the Optolong L-Enhance filter. Which of these changes introduced the noise bands?
It looks like my next task will be tracking down the cause, and then resolving, the cause. (Just when I thought I had this hobby sorted out for a time…)
Image details:
- Gain: 50
- Offset: 10
- Temperature: 0 degrees C
- Exposure: 10 seconds
- Lights: 360
- Darks: 25
- Flats: 25
- Dark Flats (Bias): 25
- Stacked and proc’d in Affinity Photo
It’s difficult to tell with the low-res image I’ve posted here, but the core of the nebula is not over-exposed. It’s one of the hardest DSOs to capture properly - there’s a super-bright core and very dim clouds of gas and dust. Balancing the image capturing and image processing necessary to show off Orion is a bit of an art, rather than a science.
M42 - The Orion Nebula
A cropped / zoomed in view of the nebula. Note the bright stars at the core - I didn’t nuke the core during the image processing work.
