The Great Orion Nebula (M42)

It's a bit noisy and the color may not be quite right, but this is (as of January 11th) my best image of M42. The tracking has improved a bit since last year, but my method of polar alignment is still pretty primitive, so I couldn't go much deeper in terms of exposure. Regardless, I believe the color and processing are quite a bit more natural/accurate in comparison to my M42 shot from last year. (If anything is glaringly inaccurate or the colors are too garish on your screen, please point it out to me, as I processed this image on a laptop without a high level LCD.)

The majority if the 56 exposures (ranging from 30-50 seconds at f/6.3 with a vintage 1970's Celestron C8) were taken from severely light polluted skies (and almost direct moonlight). Over the last several nights, I have taken close to 150 exposures of M42, and this morning I chose the best 56 of those exposures and stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker and then processed the resulting image in Photoshop.

The exposures were taken with a new camera, a Pentax K200D, which so far has proven to be a major step up from my previous camera, a Pentax *ist DL. Pentax cameras are quite noisy in comparison to Canons and Nikons, but they preserve quite a bit of detail at higher ISO settings, due to a "hands-off" approach to noise reduction, which I like. So all in all, I'm very pleased with the new camera, so expect some great macros when spring rolls around.


I am quite proud of this image, which is a result of several nights of lugging around heavy equipment, driving back and forth to the country, frozen fingers, and a lot of processing.

Feel free to ask any questions about astrophotography, but keep in mind I am a novice more or less when it comes to this type of photography.

(EDIT - Jan. 15th, 2009: I have re-uploaded the photo as I added a few longer exposures to the stack, which now consists 64 photos stacked ranging from 30 seconds at iso 800 to 55 seconds at iso 1600. So the photo is now (hopefully) more detailed, somewhat smoother, and possibly slightly brighter.)