Orion followed by California Nebula (M42, NGC1499)

You might not believe it but because I do not have a great southern view of the sky I have not turned my current rig on the most famous night sky object outside of our Solar System.

Tonight is the night, full moon be damned I will be dialling down the exposure time to 120 seconds from my usual 3 or 5 minutes and grab what I hope will be 5 hours of exposure on the Orion Nebula through the l-enhance filter. Given I will definitely lose Orion by midnight I will then turn my imaging to the California Nebula NGC1499, this is an object I have never imaged before but the images I see on Astrobin really do shine.

Orion Nebula – M42

1. 152 Lights 2m at ISO800

2. 30 Darks

3. 30 Flats (1s at ISO800)

Darks and Flats where also used for the second target of the night. A clear night with very few dropped frames. Unfortunately I forgot to note the dropped frames but I estimate total integration time of 4h 40m.

My opinion of M42 is that at one level it’s an easy target. Lots of signal, in fact that’s the problem as you want the signal to show the fine cloud structure but the inner core when you take this approach is overblown. I believe the trick is to take a range of exposure times and combine as layers. I’m afraid this is more a first grab at this target so no such finesse. The following image was processed with a simple stretch with Levels and Curves followed by a hint of masked colour boost.

The Great Orion Nebula – M42

California Nebula – NGC1499

I used the same lights and darks as M42. Before dropping below my local horizon I managed to grab 92 2m images at ISO800. Rejecting 10% of the lowest quality as judged by Deep Sky Stacker in this case gave me 82 or 2h 44m integration.

I used the same workflow as M42 in Photoshop which was some simple Levels and Curves then production of a mask to use as the basis for a Vibrance Adjustment layer, to which I added a little saturation and vibrance to make the reds pop that little bit more.

California Nebula – NGC1499

As with all images some additional integration would would be welcome but especially I think in the case of this faint smudge of hydrogen.