The Great Orion Nebula (Messier 42). We all know it. It’s one of the first targets we point our telescope or camera at before stumbling down the ridiculous rabbit hole that is astrophotography.

One of my main goals in astrophotography has been to meticulously create the most detailed and deep image of the Orion Nebula I could manage. A perfect challenging in astrophotography, in my opinion, as Orion is both a delightful and easy target for beginners, and as advanced a target as we might like for revisiting in years to come. Over the past three years or so I’ve accumulated some 150 hours of data on Orion, scattered amidst assorted experiments and attempts in editing (which, up until now, I’ve never finished). Over the past four months I’ve collected the images for this rendition, and spent an embarrassing amount of time learning and experimenting with new (to me) post-processing approaches to arrive at this result. I’m sincerely delighted to share this labor of love with everyone.

Constrictive feedback is absolutely welcome. I also welcome discussion and opinions on subjective aesthetic considerations as well. I never cease amazing in how much there is to learn in this hobby. I’ve learned a lot from our community.

Post-Processing

Source data includes two nights of long and short exposures captured with my Celestron RASA-8 and ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, and numerous nights captured with my Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 and ZWO ASI2600MM Pro with Astronomik UV/IR L2 and Deep Sky RGB filters. With the Takahashi I captured short and long exposures in luminance and color, along with a separate 4-panel mosaic in LRGB (RGB filters binned) which I used for stars and fine detail in highlights. I discarded sub-par data from sessions liberally. A master luminance image was created with data combined from both telescopes (blended into RASA data for the larger field of view, which was a point of challenge). A master color image was created with the RASA data, which contributed color for nebulae and background. And the four-panel mosaic was prepared and processed separately, ultimately contributing detail in highlights and the stars in the final rendition. And just because, why not—I’ve gone this far—I used my best subset of 5s exposures captured in Hα, last year, for luminance on the Trapezium. (The original is more than 16000 pixels across, and I went out of my way to present fine detail so a large print could end up on my wall, allowing me to appreciate details up close, returning me to these fun and stupidly cold nights whenever I like.) Starless versions were sent out to Adobe Photoshop for final combination and blending. Some normal PixInsight steps, like HDR combination, also ended up being handled, in part, in Adobe Photoshop. PixInsight was used during this process for features such as Local Histogram Equalization.

It’s challenging to outline post-processing details on this one because the workflow ended up looking like the stereotypical insane person’s wall cataloging a crime scene investigation, but I’m delighted to answer any questions someone may have.