M42 Orion Nebula (Layered) w/2 meteors!

[Hankmeister3]

There's a lot going on with this image capture from last year, 10/27/2018. I was in my seventh month of digitally capturing DSOs and sky conditions were very nice (Pickering 5 with very nice transparency) and some very cool weather moved in thus helping "cool down" my DSLR. Yesterday, when I learned about photoshop layering, I reprocessed this extraordinary DSO capture and this is the result.

There's still considerable "noise" that can be seen in the background sky and if anyone wants to take this image and work their own magic, they're welcome to it but just tell me how you did it so it can be a learning experience for me.

Working in cold weather around the 40 to 45 degree mark, I noticed camera performance certainly improved. Noise levels were lower and I could go deeper into my exposure time with single frame. In fact, I have several images of M42 that I captured at ISO 800 which are nice but with the f/4 Quattro 8 I was having to limit my exposures to 2.75 and 3 minutes before background fog/skyglow created too much noise which given my post-production knowledge at the time I couldn't "filter out" very well.

As to the double meteor strikes, the only thing I could figure was A) these were real deal meteor images and given their extraordinary parallel trajectories they must have been daughter pieces broken off a parent meteor either before or after they struck our atmosphere. Or, B) this is some kind of unusual digital artifact of the camera CCD sensor itself but I always make sure my Canon EOS DSLRs go through their "auto cleaning" mode at least every 30 to 45 minutes of imaging time to eliminate such digital artifacts and noise. I often turn off my cameras now and then during my evening sessions which also auto cleans whatever this feature is supposed to clean. So at this point I'm assuming these are legit meteor images and I'm posting this image with that assumption. But mainly I wanted to demonstrate just how far one can push a 117 second, ISO 1600 single-frame exposure using basic photoshop style software.

Skywatcher Quattro 8 f/4 fast Newtonian
Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro PEC + Sidereal Rate guidance only
Canon EOS 80D DSLR (unmodified)
117 seconds, ISO 1600
Layered in ArcSoft Photoshop 6.0
imaged 10/27/2018

[BABOafrica]

Better this time around.

BABO

[Hankmeister3]

Thank you again for the encouragement, babo.

[Hankmeister3]

I'm posting another "practice" frame of M42 Orion Nebula. I thought it would be a good frame to practice my new layering technique in Arcsoft PhotoStudio 6.0. In this case I played around with 3 layers and I can't say it's significantly better than my previous posts of M42 (with meteors) but I think I do see some minor improvement in the blown-out area while holding the extended nebulosity. I also applied a little more Guassian blur and did a little more color balancing in the cyan channel though I didn't think that made a significant difference either.

Last year the month of September had some very nicely transparent skies with Pickering 5 to 6 nights at times. After studying up on the Bortle scale, I'd have to say general sky conditions around here are Bortle 5 or worse (havest time has made it even worse now with all the dust) but last September, early in the morning, I remember several sessions where the sky was a solid 4, even maybe a 3.5 if there's such a thing. The only time I've been under a Bortle 2 sky was about 40 years ago when my wife and I were driving through Kansas and stopped along Interstate 70 in November after a cool/cold front moved through the state and we got out of the car to check out the sky. Astonishingly dark and transparent.

In my astro-film days, the darkest sky I saw after the Kansas experience was in the early 1980s when we traveled up to Mt. Palomar from San Clemente where we then lived for a look-see at the facilities and I dragged my fork-mounted 10" f/5.5 Meade mirrored telescope with home-made tube assembly and clock-drive for an overnight. Great seeing until about midnight when the fog started rolling in. It was all visual and no astrophotography that night. Close to a Bortle 2, certainly a solid Bortle 3 sky at our altitude but no better than that if I'm understanding the Bortle scale properly. Transparency was probably a nice 7 out of 10 and light pollution wasn't much of an issue unless you looked southwest toward San Diego which was over the horizon. Mt. Palomar was several thousand more feet above where we were camping.

The meta-date on this frame is:

Canon EOS 77D
135 seconds, ISO 1600
9/15/2018

single-frame, 3 layers, no filter
Quattro 8 inch f/4
Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro mount PPEC + Sidereal

[Micke187]

This object is a little bit to bright to use with high iso settings. Try to lower the iso to maybe 200-500 to keep the core from blowing out to much . Its one of the more difficult target to image due to the bright core it got. It really is better to stack with shorter subs for the core and longer for the fainter nebulosity for this object.
But for single sub you really got alot of details and not especially noisy.

[Hankmeister3]

True, that's what I had already planned on doing in November if we can string some nice nights together. The images of Orion are from last year when I was first learning about single-frame digital astro-imaging.

Going to a lower ISO will certainly help the dynamic range end of things, but I don't think that will be enough - but it will help. I also have "highlight details" and "noise reduction" maxed out in my camera's pulldown menu but the former doesn't seem to have much effect on long bulb exposures. With single-frame astrophotography I'm pretty much limited to what I can do at the camera and in post-production. I'm thinking with my Canon 80D I can go to an incremental ISO like 640 or drop further down to 400 and just burn a longer exposure. And then bump the contrast way down on my first pass through the ArcSoft Photo Studio suite and then try to get a good layer effect to mitigate the blown out core and possibly reveal more detail.

If you saw some of my earlier efforts last Fall and early winter, well … let's just say I'm getting better results now. All a part of the learning curve. When I string enough good M42 images together under a nice transparent Pickering 6 or above sky, I'll stack those donor images and see what comes up. Like Andromeda, M42 has a really hot inner core with some very nice details to be picked up in the outer parts. I've seen some beautifully rendered M42 images that show mucho nebulosity in the outer "arms" while showing quite a bit of nebular detail around Trapezium. It's something to shoot for but I know with single-frame capture I'm never coming close to that sort of "luminosity equalization" unless there's some kind of software out there that allows me to drop a much shorter exposure of the Trapezium into a complementary frame of longer exposure and then have it all blended together … but then it wouldn't be a single-frame. Doh! I'll just keep tinkering into something nicer happens. Sigh.

I'ma learnin'!

[Sky]

Those 2 "meteors" are actually Geostationary satellites. Images of M42 are often peppered with these little vermin.