Here's my first attempt at the Orion Nebula.
I'm not super happy with it honestly, but it was a bitch and a half to collect the scant exposures I managed to get over the course of many many days:
- 2023-02-08 - 60 x L (unused)
- 2023-02-11 - 10 x G, 30 x R
- 2023-02-12 - 30 x B, 19 x R
- 2023-02-13 - 29 x G
- 2023-02-18 - 30 x B, 3 x G
- 2023-02-19 - 5 x B, 30 x G, 30 x R
- 2023-03-02 - 20 x B, 5 x G, 19 x R
Lol, what a struggle to get such sad amounts of exposures, this should have been a 1 night affair! Lots of time pruning branch covered photos.
This target is obstructed in my backyard except for maybe a 1-2 hour gap at the very start of the night, with a tree it goes behind in the middle of that. Combined with the worst cloud covered season in 83 years, I eventually got fed up with trying to get hardly more than an hour of each colour channel. I didn't even bother using the L filter, just straight RGB. No darks either as I had to switch to -10 degrees from 0 and I haven't retaken my darks yet.
All in all, I guess for such little exposure on a bright target, coupled with the fact that I have very little experience actually doing straight RGB work vs Narrowband, I'm willing to count this as "not too bad" and move on. I was also struggling with remembering how to do everything I've learned as I haven't processed in months since it's been cloud city around here and I was caught up on my stuff. Luckily one of the classes I took in the last month or two talked about a tool useful specifically for fixing M42's overblown core. If I could figure out masking I could sharpen this up a bit more without ruining the dark strands in the middle.
A good test of getting back into processing and working with limited data at least. Maybe I'll come back next year if I collect some more data and get far more L to see how that helps. I found it just hindered my other colour channels, perhaps I didn't have enough or know how to combine it well.
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