Messier Catalog - M42 - Orion Nebula

Constellation: Orion

December 19, 2005. M42 and M43 using Artemis 285 and colour filters. It is exactly 2 years since the last time I imaged this nebula. The conditions were again far from ideal, with bright moon and drifting fog. Again this was an improvement after many weeks of really bad weather. The image is an LRGB image M42/M43 taken through my C8 and Meade 0.33x focal reducer, and an ATIK filter holder. Exposure Luminance (1x1 binning): 20x20s, Colour (2x2 binning) R:20x12s, G=20x30s, B:20x30s Processing Each channel aligned and stacked using K3CCDTools. LRGB composite made using Photoshop CS2 Other versions: 100% and 75% sizes.

December 19, 2003. M42 and M43 using SC3 B/W camera. The conditions were far from ideal, with both wind and cloud problems, but at least it was an improvement compared to the previous ~5-6 weeks with very bad weather. The image is a mosaic of M42/M43 taken through my C8 using a Mogg IRB filter/Mogg focal reducer and my Vesta SC3 black and white camera, which has also been modified with setpwc (sharpness=0, noise red=0) via Knoppix. I used 17.5 second exposures, stacked them in K3CCDTools and created a mosaic in Photoshop.

All images below were shot with my old Vesta 675K SC1 camera (uncooled).

	November 1, 2002. The same exposure as below, but improved processing to remove some of the black holes caused by dark frame subtraction. Richardson-Lucy deconvoltution has also been applied in IRIS (RL 4 1) to improve overall sharpness.
	November 1, 2002. 73.05 KB The core of M42, The Orion Nebula, 01. November 2002. Another mosaic attempt. The image was shot at f10 using 3 different exposures for each patch, 50x7sec + 25x17sec + 15x30sec. Processing in Registax and mosaic in Photoshop. Notice that the trapezium is resolved, while still showing a lot of nebulosity.