His blog is at http://astrokowang.blogspot.com/2014/12/m42-required-image.phpl
Running Man and Orion Nebulae
NGC 1977 & M42
© 2015 Kwang Lee
I had to devote several nights to getting the exposures to make this image. This was shot on the nights of Nov 24, 25, 30, then Dec 14 and 15. I used 31 x 15 min exposures, 46 x 5 min exposures, 35 x 2 min exposures, 35 x 15 seconds, and 35 x 5 seconds. That's about 13 hours of exposure. I actually shot about 17 hours of total exposure, but I only used the best 80% of the shots to process the image.
It's kind of a mandatory shot for any astrophotographer, but I wanted to do it because I knew I would get something worthwhile as it's so bright.
There are issues with the image. The darker dust structures around the edges of the brightest parts are noisy. I got those structures from those longer 15 min subexposures, but I think I need like 3-4 times the number of 15 minute exposure which means another 3+ nights of imaging this object. Getting extra 15 minute shots would increase the signal-to-noise ratio which translates into less noise and more structure.
I was sorta lazy with using layer masks (a technique in Photoshop) and some of the stars are not the right brightness (too large) relative to other stars. Sharpness is an issue. Overall, I think the image is a little blurry - except near the core of the Orion nebula where the Trapezium is located (the tiny grouping of 4 stars near the center). And that Trapezium is weirdly detailed with respect to everything else.
The overall color is little garish to me. I know this object gets overly saturated by most people and I ended up doing the same thing.
Also, there is some curvature in all the corners, but most obviously in the upper right and left respectively. I've known about this for awhile, but I haven't bothered to address it. *I think* it's focuser tilt as the curvature seems to be different depending on the orientation of the camera. I also picked up some spacers to place between the flattener and the camera. If you look closely to the bottom edge, just to the right of the center you can see some artifacts from the constant parade of satellites I had to deal with. Actually the satellites aren't moving, there's a bunch of geostationary satellites that happen to be located in M42
Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner near Messier 37
© 2018 Kwang Lee
Technical details: Images were taken from my backyard with a Tak E130D reflector through the old Canon T3i. 72 x 60 seconds lights, 20 darks, 40 flats, 60 bias frames. Processed though PixInsight. Resized in Photoshop. Lights collected on 9/10/2018.
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2020 © Kwang Lee |
Spent about 30 nights in the backyard since late July to collect the images... I probably have 250+ hours of processing time on the project. The images in the collage represent around the top 2% of the data. I was able to confirm that the seeing in Doney Park does generally suck. :) Kwang Lee |
