M42, orion the hunter is back.

Hi,
Looks like a whole bunch of us were out last night, wasn't it a great sky.
Anyway, I thought it was time to resume taking pictures of the sky, and started off and the easiest DSO out there.
You might want to play around with your brightness/contrast settings (try both up full) on your monitor to see all of this image.


www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...410613-m42_hdr_1.jpg

I finally have the tracking someway good and with the use of the lumicon GEG, I was able to get 8/10 images tracked well up to 3 minutes. I used the astrometric eyepiece for the off axis guiding. I;ve found that you can easily over compensate and wreck a good image, and its hard going to physically keep it going after a duration of 5 minutes, one lapse in concentration and the image is gone, the wind didnt help either.

I used the IDAS light pollution filter in conjunction with the 300D at prime focus of my 12" SCT. Exposures used were 20s, 40s, and 180s, stacking was done in registax and processing done in photoshop CS2.

That new HDR function is cool, I'm not totally happy that I've got the hang of it, so I might be posting more enhanced versions of this image over the next few days, along with a few more planetry images, once I catch up on some badly needed sleep, didnt get to bed until 4.45 monday morning and had work at nine. :lol:

Great shot Dave. I think there might be just a few M42 images on these boards before spring is out:)

Tell you what, you need to seriously consider autoguiding, you already have a webcam dont you? all you need is an RS232 cable to send guiding corrections to the mount and some free software. Its soooo much nicer standing beside your scope drinking a coffee and watching the mount autoguide than peering down the barrel of an eyepiece. I found the novelty of manual guiding wears off very quickly. (certainly did for me anyway)

Once again super shot, keep em coming!

That image is beautiful, it looks so alive!

Nice sharp image Dave. Well done!

Really good image. You've got some good structure within the nebula. It obviously pays off to do good guiding. I agree with Dave G, going the automated way is the way to go for the future, in particular for any very long exposures you intend to do.

Eamonn A

They look fantastic. I can't wait to get my Toucam adapter so I can try and get some like this as well. Probably won't be as good with a 8" scope but I'll do my best

btw Dave - I have a Skywatcher 200 on EQ5 and I put on the dual axis motors two weeks ago - can these be autoguided as well?