M78 (jgibsonemu) - AstroBin

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: M 78 · NGC 2064 · NGC 2067 · NGC 2068 · NGC 2071

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M78

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M78

This is my first attempt at capturing this region of Orion. I have enjoyed observing the reflection nebula with my scopes over the years but never really tried to photograph the faint nebulosity that makes M78 so interesting. I must say that the faint stuff is pretty darn faint. I was expecting a photo that was a bit less challenging to process.

Color was tough to set given there is no single portion of this image that isn’t “contaminated” with dust or gas of some sort. Even at 11hrs of data the red glow of the faint H-alpha emission is just starting to show through. Certainly would be nice to have a CCD and H-alpha filter to image this with. I tried my best to not overally smooth the details and maintain a sharp life-like image.

Overall I am very pleased with this DSLR shot of M78. My total of just over 11 hours of integration time really helped in bringing out the fainter bits. I believe that I can push the processing a bit harder without much or any degradation to the image quality. I will try to give it another whirl soon to see if I can improve the overall look and feel.

Sadly this was one of my last photographs captured while still calling Vail, AZ home. This past December the family and I moved back to the lovely and not so astro-friendly region of southeast MI. I still have a couple photos to process from this final imaging trip before the move. After those I suspect I will be producing only a couple images per year. My plans are to take 1 or 2 – one week trips to my favorite dark sky site in southeast AZ.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	589488
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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