M42 the Orion Nebula (RonAdams)

M42 the Orion Nebula

I did not intend on imaging this object tonight. When I went outside I intended on imaging Comet 64P Swift-Gehrels. However I searched for this Comet in an eye piece for 45 minutes and could not locate it. The Heavens Above website lists the comet as a magnitude 9. That is relatively dim but I've located many comets through an eye piece that were that magnitude or dimmer. I brought out my 8 Inch Newtonian Astrograph because I felt I would have better luck with the larger aperture. I finally gave up on the comet and decided to target something else. I chose M42 because it's been around two years since I imaged this object with my 8 Inch Newt. I had problems imaging M42. I took 98 light frames and almost every light frame had streaks of light in them. Some images had multiple streaks. I call these streaks meteors because I don't know what else to call them. I'm not sure what they are. It's fairly common to get a streak or two in an image when imaging M42 but I've never had this many light frames ruined by streaks of light. Out of 98 light frames only 14 were usable. Anyway enough bitching and moaning. Please enjoy my most recent image of M42.

Original
B
Final
D

B

Description: I completely reprocessed my image today beginning with aligning and stacking. Today I used all 98 of my light frames containing streaks of light. Deep Sky Stacker removed the streaks of light for me. So I did not have to do that in my post processing. There's not a lot of difference in the two images other than I was able to bring out a little more of the extended nebulosity.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2491402
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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