The orion nebula imaging season has started !

Hi,
I was out late last night and had a go at imaging at F4 with the 12" meade and canon 300D, I tried the orion nebula. Using the imagemerge function in photoshop, I managed to blend differing exposures together, I'm going to try the HDR function over the coming days to bring out the center of the nebula more. I sure I can get the center to be a bit more contrasty.



This is not a mosaic, this is the field of view of the canon using the Lumicon GEG at F4.
I even got a chance to use dark frames , there is slight vignetting and if I thought of it at the time I would have taken an image of a featureless part of the sky so i could easily create a mask to undo this vignetting, but its hard to think straight at 4 in the morning.
The original bmp is very smooth, using jpeg and uploading to flickr seems to have made the image abit more grainy, what can you do the 15MB is a bit big to be uploading.
Any feedback is welcome

Dave,

Thats not a bad image at all. You got quite a bit of detail in the core without sacrificing the outer regions too much.

As for the format, I always use jpg with moderate format compression. I use no more that 20% compression at the absolute max, 10-15% more often than not. This gives a good blend of quality and size trade off. BTW BMP format will hog your disk space. Try TIF if you can or better still FITS.

Thats a fine image there Dave.

Whats the 'loop' coming off the star on the left?

Have you ever tried DeepSkyStacker?

Dave,
Good image there. Nice detail in the outer areas of the nebula but kept the core from burning out.
Nice FOV for the 12"!

Thanks for the comments guys, the loop is an internal refection that came up on one of the images before stacking, I wasn't bothered to remove it, when I redo the image in photoshop (HDR)this time, I'll remove it.

Wonderful image you captured of my favorite M object sketching target

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society
www.irishastrosoc.org