This image showcases the bright orion nebula and its surrounding dust. The bright central nebula is lit by the star cluster at its center; the rest of the dust is a combination of glowing red hydrogen and darker, cooler dust. Some notable features in this image include the tip of the horsehead nebula on the bottom left, and the dark trail of dust including NGC 1999 on the right.
This image combines 28 hours of long exposure with 30 minutes of short exposure to preserve dynamic range. 8 hours of data were discarded to create a sharper image.
Image:
Equipment:
- Nikon D800
- Nikon 300mm prime lens
- Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer
- Star Adventurer Tripod
- Bahintov Mask
- Intervalometer
- Stellarium
- All Sky Plate Solver
- Nina
- Nikonhacker software
Acquisition:
- ISO 800, f/4.0
- Taken from a bortle 2 zone during the new moon.
- Taken on 11/2, 11/3, 11/6, 11/8, 11/9, 11/10
- 572 x 3′ light frames (28.6 hours) used
- 90 x 20″ light frames (30 minutes) used
- 300 total flat frames
- 89 dark frames
- 200 bias frames
Processing:
Pre-processing:
- Images were calibrated using WBPP
- Debayer into three channels
- Subframe selector to chosse best frame
- NSG integration to create hyper lum
- NSG integration to create RGB channels
Post-processing:
- HDR composition to create HDR image
- Dynamic crop to remove stacking artifacts
- Combine RGB image
- DBE on RGB and L
- PCC on RGB image
- TGV denoise on RGB image
- MMT denoise on L image
- Arcsinh Stretch -> Masked stretch of L image
- Arcsinh Stretch -> Masked stretch of RGB image
- LRGB combination
- starnet + pixelmath to boost nebulosity
- starnet, MMT, LHE, and curves to enhance nebulosity and saturation
- star reduction
- MMT sharpening
- LHE
- slight histogram and curves transformation
Annotated Image:
