The completion of another long project. The addition of both PixInsight and my ability to have my scope being able to image all night without my intervention have led to a leap in my ability to gather and process data, but it comes at a cost of feeling slightly overwhelmed at times due to the massive amount of work involved. I'm still not entirely comfortable with Noise Reduction in PI in particular (which still leaves me image looking far too plastic or far too noisy as certain wavelet scales), and still do much of my final adjustments and masking work using Photoshop.

Still, I am mostly happy with how this image has turned out. The large amount of background nebulosity was pleasant, and the HDR function in PixInsight managed to recover so much core detail in M42 that I only needed 2 exposures rather than the 3 I originally gathered (in both Ha and RGB).

Preliminary Processing:

- Lights for all exposures calibrated using Darks, Flats, superbias in PI, filtered with Subframe Selector, StarAlign-ed, and Drizzle Integrated

- Image cloned, run through ABE multiple times, and used for placement of DBE sample points (using ABE to reveal the darkest background amongst the nebula). DBE then applied to original image multiple times

- Luminence extracted

Luminance Processing (including Hydrogen Alpha):

- Deconvolution using Dynamic PSF as well as Star Mask

- John Rista Luminance NR using TGV, then MMT

- Masked Stretch using Image Statistics for "Target Background" value

- Ha only: used StarAlign to align narrowband images to color images

Color Processing:

- Background Neutralization

- Linear Fit after using Noise Evaluation, then Photometric Color Calibration using G2V star

- John Rista Chrominance NR using TGV, then MMT

- Masked Stretch using Image Statistics for "Target Background" value

Combined Processing:

- LRGB combination to re-introduce Luminance into color images

- HDRMultiscaleTransform to increase core detail

HaRGB Processing:

- PI-completed RGB 300", 8" images loaded into PSCS6 along with H-a 600" and 5"

- Shorter exposures masked into brighter images for RGB and H-a using blurred masking to form HDR imaged

- Copied R channel of HDR color image, blended into H-a image at 40% opacity, pasted over RGB Red channel

- Orginal H-a image blended onto RGB image at 40%, then again at 50% using Luminance mask

- Stars from original RGB image re-added to HaRGB image using a Star Mask, blended as color

- Curves for contrast

- Unsharp mask for detail increase

- Increase in Saturation using Luminance Masks

- Image copied back to PI for Plate Solving and Annotation