Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Orion (Ori)  ·  Contains:  20 tau Ori  ·  22 o Ori  ·  25 Ori  ·  27 p Ori  ·  28 eta Ori  ·  31 Ori  ·  34 del Ori  ·  36 ups Ori  ·  41 the01 Ori  ·  42 c Ori  ·  43 the02 Ori  ·  44 iot Ori  ·  45 Ori  ·  46 eps Ori  ·  48 sig Ori  ·  49 d Ori  ·  50 zet Ori  ·  55 Ori  ·  60 Ori  ·  Alnilam  ·  Alnitak  ·  B33  ·  De Mairan's nebula  ·  Great Nebula in Orion  ·  Hatysa  ·  Horsehead nebula  ·  IC 423  ·  IC 426  ·  IC 430  ·  IC 431  ·  And 103 more.
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Orion at 85 mm in H-alpha, JDJ
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Orion at 85 mm in H-alpha

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Orion at 85 mm in H-alpha, JDJ
Powered byPixInsight

Orion at 85 mm in H-alpha

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This wide field image of the central region of the Orion constellation was captured on the nights of January 20/21/25/29 and February 2, 2020 using a short telephoto lens and dual narrowband filter. As is the case for many of us, this was one of my first deep sky astrophotography targets and remains a perennial favorite. I captured images at two different exposure durations (30 s and 240 s) to generate HDR images capturing both faint nebulocity and a bit more detail in the core of M42. This is image includes the H-alpha data (red channel).

Imaged with 85mm/F1.4 Rokinon at F/2, STC Duo Narrowband Clip Filter, and full spectrum modified Nikon D5300.

Pre-processed using PixInsight Batch Pre-Processing (BPP) script. Images calibrated using darks, bias, and flats. Extracted red/green/blue channels using BatchChannelExtraction script. R, G, & B channels registered and stacked independently using StarAlighment and Integration. R channel data gives the Ha image. Averaged G & B channels using Pixelmath to generate OIII image.

For the long exposures, total integration time of ~4 hours using 68 subs at ISO200 x 240 sec.

For the long exposures, total integration time of ~1 hour using 51 subs at ISO200 x 30 sec.

R and Average of G+B channels individually post-processed in Pixinsight: Cropped, gradient removal with ABE, HDRComposition (binarizing threshold = 0.6) to combine different exposure lengths, MLT for noise reduction, stretched using masked stretch, Curves Transformation, TGVDenoise for noise reduction, HDR transform, Local histogram transform, morphological transform to shrink stars.

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