Image: The Great Orion Nebula (M42)

Description: From Flickr: "It's a bit noisy and the color may not be quite right, but this is (as of January 11th, 2009) my best image of M42. The tracking has improved a bit since last year, but my method of polar alignment is still pretty primitive, so I couldn't go much deeper in terms of exposure. Regardless, I believe the color and processing are quite a bit more natural/accurate in comparison to my M42 shot from last year. (If anything is glaringly inaccurate or the colors are too garish on your screen, please point it out to me, as I processed this image on a laptop without a high level LCD.) The majority if the 56 exposures (ranging from 30-50 seconds at f/6.3 with a vintage 1970's Celestron C8) were taken from severely light polluted skies (and almost direct moonlight). Over the last several nights, I have taken close to 150 exposures of M42, and this morning I chose the best 56 of those exposures and stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker and then processed the resulting image in Photoshop. The exposures were taken with a new camera, a <a href="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/pentaxk200d/">Pentax K200D</a>, which so far has proven to be a major step up from my previous camera, a Pentax *ist DL. Pentax cameras are quite noisy in comparison to Canons and Nikons, but they preserve quite a bit of detail at higher ISO settings, due to a "hands-off" approach to noise reduction, which I like. So all in all, I'm very pleased with the new camera, so expect some great macros when spring rolls around. I am quite proud of this image, which is a result of several nights of lugging around heavy equipment, driving back and forth to the country, frozen fingers, and a lot of processing. (EDIT - Jan. 15th, 2009: I have re-uploaded the photo as I added a few longer exposures to the stack, which now consists 64 photos stacked ranging from 30 seconds at iso 800 to 55 seconds at iso 1600. So the photo is now (hopefully) more detailed, somewhat smoother, and possibly slightly brighter.)"
Title: The Great Orion Nebula (M42)
Credit: originally posted to Flickr as The Great Orion Nebula (M42)
Author: Opo Terser
Permission: This image, which was originally posted to Flickr.com, was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 21:50, 14 April 2009 (UTC) by Rocket000 (talk). On that date, it was available under the license indicated. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 truetrue
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