The orion nebula imaging season has started !

Love it Dave. What length subs did you use?

Trev[/quote]

That's a fine image of the nebula Dave, and fair play to ya out in the freezing cold last night! I like the amount of dust detail there, and better still, the core does'nt seem burned out. Top marks!

Keith..

Thanks for the kind words guys,
Dave Gr, I'll keep your tip in mind when I reprocess the image.

the stacked exposures were
2 x 10 second
4 x 15 second
8 x 30 second
6 x 1 minute
4 x 2 minute
1 x 4 minute
1 x 5 minute

I made the mistake of taking the longer exposures later on in the night when M42 was low, thus more light pollution showed up in the image, ideally it would make sense to go for the longer exposures when the object is near/at the meridan, I found that I couldn't go more then 5 minutes before the "fog" in the image became too much, even with a light pollution filter in there.

Keith, by god was it a cold night!, even though it didn't go below freezing, I didn't fully recover from it until this morning. :lol:

Frank, I'll download it and give it a go sometime.

I was also getting some erratic behaviour out of the the ST4 also, I discovered that ice was forming over the CCD detector so the guide star was not been seen correctly, so it time to dismantle it and dry out the dessicate to get rid of the moisture.

BTW, the canon power supply is the bees knees

Hi Dave,

This is a nice image. I am somewhat surprised by the amount of noise in the dim areas and in spite of the fact that you used a wide variety of exposure times and exposures. Out of curiosity, what ISO did you use? With my EOS 300d, ISO 1600 is out of the question (due to noise) and ISO 800 can at times be slightly problematic.

HDR processing in Photoshop is something which interests me very much and I would love to see your results. I am quite eager to try HDR for myself and M42 is the ideal candidate for it.

Hi Anthony,
Yea, I agree, if you look closely, you'll see alot of tiny red specs all over the place, even though I used iso800 and dark frames.
I'm contending with ALOT of light pollution at my location so I'm pushing the red levels much more then with an image got at a dark site to bring out the red (after surpressing the pollution glow) thus showing them up alot more then would be normal.

The HDR is a difficult one to get right and I've found you need a high power PC to do it otherwise it takes ages, but I'm not beaten yet, so when I get a better image, I'll put it up with its details.

well dave,
well done on the image top marks detail is well captured