M42 & M43, a different look

This is a single 30 second exposure at ISO 800 Of M42 from March 10th. Unfortunately, I had more issues with my mount, and most of this set ended up centered too poorly to add to any previous sets. Rather than just duplicate the shot from a couple of weeks ago, I made curves and levels adjustments to this set, producing one heavily underexposed and one heavily overexposed copy, then combined as an HDR set in PhotoShop.

And this is the surprising result-taken from about 50 30-second exposures (actually, 94 exposures-over 40 were thrown out due to tracking errors), in a polluted sky, with a telescope that was falling out of the mounting clamps...there is detail in there I would not have dreamed of catching. Every bit of detail is contained in the photo above; what stacking does is average out the noise while keeping the signal, allowing the image to be stretched without the noise going with it. I was especially pleased with all the dust lanes in M43 (the upper circular part of the nebula, at the top in this picture.) Of course, it's still a very noisy picture; there is no substitute for catching more photons. Click the image for a larger view. The saved TIFF file is better than this jpeg, but file size matters here...

M42 may be the most over-photographed thing in the sky, but there is just so much going on there, within the reach of small amateur scopes, that it's no wonder.