Peering deep into the the core of M42

This is yet another image from telescope live. Although the total exposure time was a little over 45 minutes, the fact that Orion is so bright meant that the snr was still quite high. I’ve been iterating through versions of this image to figure out the best method of HDRing the core, and I feel like I’ve been settling on a pretty solid method using MMT. The detail in the core that I managed to pull out is really interesting to look at, so I highly recommend looking at the full PNG or the cropped views down below.

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves – fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The featured image, taken last month, shows a two-hour exposure of the nebula in three colors. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

Image:

Full quality PNG here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52839122172_3a370ff8a6_o.png

Closeups:

Details:

Telescope:  Planewave CDK24
Camera: FLI PL 9000 
Filters: Astrodon RGB
Location: El Sauce Observatory, Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region, Chile
Date of Observations: 12/11/2020, 12/21/2020, 1/7/2021, 2/4/2021
R: 31 x 30s (15min 30s)
G: 30 x 30s (15min)
B: 30 x 30s (15min)
Processing: Pixinsight
Credits: Data: Telescope Live; Processing: William Ostling

Processing:

Pre-Processing:
- Some subframes were fixed for astronometric solution
- Images were cosmetic corrected for hot pixels
- The subframes were weighted, registered, normalized, integrated, and drizzled in WBPP
Preparation of all frames:
- Stacking artifacts were cropped
- RGB channels were combined to create an RGB image
- RGB image was plate solved
- Starless DBE was applied to RGB as follows:
      - Starnet 2 was applied to a clone of the target image, creating an image with stars and an image without stars
      - DBE was applied on the starless image to create a background model
      - The background model was subtracted from the stars image
Deconvolution of the RGB
- a PSF was created using the dynamic PSF process
- Linear starnet was applied to create a starless image and a star mask
- the linear image was duplicated, stretched, clipped, and convoluted to create a mask
- The starless image was deconvoluted using the RVC algorithm
- the stars were added back in
- DeepSNR noise reduction was applied to RGB
Non-linear Adjustments
- Initial HT stretch
- Adjustment using MMT
- Saturation Adjustment
- LHE
- Noise reduction
- Slight curves adjustment