I had two goals for this two-panel mosaic of M42 and M43.  I aimed to keep the Trapezium visible, and at the same time bring out the dark dust that surrounds the two bright nebulae.  As a first step, I wanted to minimize saturated pixels in my subframes.  I took a series of snapshots and used NINA's Imaging/Statistics panel to measure the number of saturated pixels at each exposure.  I settled on 25s, which kept the saturated pixels at around 1000 (out of 25.6M).  This was much shorter than my typical 240 or 300s exposure for dimmer DSOs.  I learned rather quickly that the volume of data gets very large very fast with such short exposures; I was finishing each night with 20-24 GB of data, instead of my usual 4-5.  The number of subs also made processing a challenge.  Even with  a gaming PC that has a fast GPU and 64GB of RAM, I still managed to run out of memory the first time I integrated one of the panels (alas, at about 87% of the last channel...).

Time on the two panels skewed toward the upper half as I down-selected subframes more aggressively on the lower panel.  The split came out about 60/40.

I used PixInsight for all processing.  Key processes included Photometric Mosaic, Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch, and more than 50 applications of Local Histogram Equalization, isolated to different areas with GAME masks and with the application of multiple kernel radii to the same areas.  In GHS I used many small steps with a strong application of Protect Highlights.  This allowed me to bring up the dark dust surrounding the nebulae while at the same time preventing the Trapezium from saturating.  Beyond that, I used Bill Blanshan's color masks to adjust saturation by color.  I left the colors of the nebulae on the soft side to keep them as relatively equal partners to the surrounding dust.

The Orion Nebula is one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth, only 1500 light years away.   

Taken from my Bortle 5 backyard in Tucson, Arizona.