A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42 (Matthew Sole)

A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42

The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is amazing. There are so many cool things in this section of the night sky and here is my favourite part of it. I hope you like it.

With a total integration time just short of 21 hours this was the most ambitious and difficult image my telescope has given me yet. Captured from my backyard over 8 nights from November 11th until the 5th of January.

Processing:

Astro Pixel Processor

Pre-processing:

Individual red, green and blue panels calibrated, analysed, registered and normalised.

Stacked in APP with LN Winsor clipping and drizzle integration resulting in a resolution increase of 1.5x and giving me 9 seperate frames to combine.

Integrated panels then combined in APP using mosaic registration and LNC set to 2nd degree 10 iterations normalising the brightness of each panel to the others and eliminating seam artefacts.

Post processing:

Panels combined into an RGB image and cropped to remove stacking artefacts at the borders

Light Pollution removal and Background Calibration

Star Colour Calibration

Selective colour to remove green pixels and chromatic background noise

Saved for further processing in PixInsight

Pixinsight:

Taken to non-linear over 4 seperate histogram stretches

Background neutralisation

Curve adjustments - saturation, contrast and a slight stretch

SCNR at 30%

ACDNR Noise reduction

HDR Multi-scale transform to reveal blown out details

Further histogram stretch

Dark structure enhance script

Star reduction script

ADV sharpening script

Saved for further processing in Affinity Photo

Affinity Photo:

Black point adjustment

Saturation and vibrance increase

Contrast and brightness adjustment

Small curve increase

Cropped and downsampled

Exported for web

Southern Hemisphere Astro

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3191355
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42

A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Sky plot

Histogram

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Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42

A three panel mosaic - NGC 2024, IC 434 and M42

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

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