The first image from my new mount! The GEM28 has turned out to be an incredibly accurate mount, giving me sharp stars at 600mm with 4 minute exposures!
The Great Orion Nebula, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. The bright core illuminates the surrounding the star cluster, highlighting the streams of dark dust on top.
Image:
Equipment:
- Nikon D800
- 600mm F4 lens
- GEM 28
- NINA
- Nikonhacker
Acquisition:
- ISO 800, F4
- Taken from a bortle 1 zone in Northwest CT
- 61 x 240s subframes (4.1 hours) – Taken on 1/21/2022
- 48 x 15s subframes (13 mins)
Processing:
- Subframes were calibrated and channel-split VNG debayered using WBPP
- Subframes were weighted using subframe selector
- Each subframe was registered using distortion correction
- Each channel was integrated seperately
- RGB channel combine + Crop stacking artifacts
- Dynamic bacground extration
- Photometric color calibration
- RGB workingspace was set to 1:1:1 and a luminance was extracted
- Deconvolution on the Luminance
- TGV denoise on Luminance and RGB
- RGB was stretched using ArcsinH stretch and Histogram transformation
- L was stretched using an average of Masked stretch and Histogram transformation, then a slight HDR was applied
- LRGB combination
- Starnet was applied to a copy of the image, then the small scale layers were removed using MMT and the dust was enhanced using LHE. This was blended back into the image
- Adam Block-style star reduction
- MMT sharpening to get a better star PSF and enhance detail
- Slight saturation increase
3 thoughts on “A luminous M42”
On another topic but I need to say it directly to you – Congratulations!!!!
Nice work, it’s always satisfying when new equipment increases performance.
Thank you! I feel I can take advantage of my skies a lot more with this mount.