M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50 (Rowland Archer)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Orion (Ori) · Contains: 41 Ori A) · 41 Ori C · 41 Ori D · 41 the01 Ori · 43 Ori) · 43 the02 Ori · 44 Ori) · 44 iot Ori · Great Orion Nebula · HD36782 · HD36917 · HD36918 · HD36959 · HD36960 · HD36981 · HD36982 · HD36999 · HD37000 · HD37042 · HD37061 · HD37062 · HD37115 · HD37150 · HD37188 · Hatysa · LBN 974 · Lower Sword · M 42 · M 43 · Mairan's Nebula · And 10 more.

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M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

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M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

I couldn't resist trying out the $499 Seestar S50 and at this time of year M42 is a natural target to try. 42, the Great Nebula in Orion, is tricky - it's very bright and thus a seductive target for starting out, but it's actually not an easy object to capture in detail as it has a very high dynamic range.

My first effort was using the real-time stacking built into the ZWO Seestar app. It was impressive for such a low cost item, but once I learned that you can also save individual FIT files and process them later, I had to go that route.

The default exposure of the Seestar is 10s, so I let it run on M42 as long as I could one night and got 460 10s exposurs, so 4600s, just over 1.25 hours.

The FIT files you get from the Seestar are already calibrated, so I just loaded them into PI's WBPP and did a full integration with all the bells and whistles including Drizzle. The drizzle'd image was ever so slightly better than non-drizzle, so I used that as my base. I applied BlurXT, SPCC, a touch of NoiseXT, did a masked stretch, then HDRMT, LHE and Curves for contrast and color boost. I exported a TIF to 3DLUTCreator and gave it a bit more of a boost. The result is here.

If you look in my gallery you can see my attempt at M42 with my 10X more expensive EAA gear about six years ago. Astrophotography has come a long way!

ZWO Seestar S50
Suburban Astrophotography

All Images
Messier Catalog
Nebulae

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9056323
PixInsight job	E617F2YONV9HBNV5968MR22NP471309F
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	05h35m04s.71
RA (top/left)	05h35m20s.53
RA (top/right)	05h32m52s.27
RA (bottom/right)	05h34m48s.75
RA (bottom/left)	05h37m17s.90

Dec (center)	-05°27′52″.9
Dec (top/left)	-04°52′14″.1
Dec (top/right)	-05°13′37″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	-06°03′33″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	-05°42′26″.2

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M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

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M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

M 42 - The Great Nebula in Orion - Seestar S50

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