Orion Constellation - The Hunter (Gabriel R. Santos (grsotnas))

Orion Constellation - The Hunter

My image of this beautiful and famous contellation - Orion, the Hunter. This image was captured during the course of 3 nights. In the 18th I only managed to get 3 light frames, that were added to 7 lights captured the following day. Both of these were taken from a Rural dark sky, around Bortle 3-4, NELM ~6-6.5, with a HEQ5 Pro Go-To, without guiding. On the 21st of January I captured 10 60second exposures from the inner city of Crisitna (~10000 citzens; Bortle 5-6) with the EQ3-2 mount.

Several famous objects cam be seen, both dim and bright nebulosity. In the centre of the image the you can see Orion's Belt and his Sword. The Sword contains a beautiful nebula, the brightest in the Northern part of the sky, the Orion Nebula, or M42, along with the Running Man Nebula. In the belt itself you can see the Horsehead Nebula, IC434/B33, a fainter, but equaly astonishing object. A little bit left of IC434 you can see a reflection nebula, M78, a difficult to capture object with a DSLR. You can also see the red "Barnard's Loop", a massive structure, but with extremely low surface brightness. It'd have been better captured using a CCD or modified DSLR, with improved Halpha response. However, I'm quite happy with how it it is visible in this image, considering it was done with a stock camera. Near the right top corner, you can see the Witch's Head Nebula, or IC2118, that "is an extremely faint reflection nebula believed to be an ancient supernova remnant or gas cloud illuminated by nearby supergiant star Rigel in Orion" [from Wikipedia]. It is brighter than I expected for such a relatively short integration time of 1 hour.

The image was processed using DSS for Stacking, CS2 for stretching, curves, levels, saturation, Scott Rosen's SMI, High Pass Filtering, Luminosity Layers, Lab Color. Finally, I got a nice image, but the core of M42 was blown up. Then I used my 60s subs, merged them with the Deep version in Grayscale using masks, creating a HDR luminance layer, that was finally added to the Deep Colored version. It was the only way to get the balance correctly, because the 60s images had a very different color (LP).

I always appreciate comments, constructive criticism, suggestions....

Taken on Cristina, MG, Brazil, in both the Rural Area (Bortle 3-4; 50min Deep ) and the Inner city Centre (Bortle 5-6; HDR 60s subs). Thanks for seeing.

Camera: Unmodded T4i/650D at ISO 800

Lens: Canon 50mm f/1.8 II, stopped down to f/4.0

Exposure Detail: 10x300s or 10x5 minutes (3 on 1st night; 7 on 2nd night); (Bortle 3-4)

10x60s or 10x1min ( on 3rd night, shot from Bortle 5-6); total 60 minutes

* The -Original- version was my final result, with a less agressive stretching, with a rich starfield*

*Verision -B- features a more intense Star Shrinking, and a bit more contrast boosting, using HPF and Curves. It looks a bit overprocessed on full res, but on Astrobin it actually looked better*

*Version -C- is -B- version a little bit darker*

*The -F- version I processed a little bit more than usual, using Star Reduction, and SMI with Dust and Scratches Filter. The stars are definitely not pleasent at 100%, but the nebulosity looks nice. It is worth having a look.*

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1259597
PixInsight job	KXUUIJCU1Z749MFIDB37HYT496O185AL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h34m30s.4
RA (top/left)	05h02m45s.8
RA (top/right)	05h01m44s.7
RA (bottom/right)	06h06m37s.4
RA (bottom/left)	06h07m06s.8

Dec (center)	-01°17′32″
Dec (top/left)	+10°31′51″
Dec (top/right)	-13°00′35″
Dec (bottom/right)	-13°07′46″
Dec (bottom/left)	+10°26′04″

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