The Orion Nebula is one of the first objects I attempted imaging almost a year ago. I still have a lot of fun trying to capture this dynamic and vibrant area of the sky. It challenges me to show both the bright core around the trapezium as well as the faint wispy feathery bits that extend outward. I did my best and made some trade-offs given my current processing ability, so the trapezium unfortunately isn't clearly visible in this version. (I might try masking differently stretched layers in the Gimp or look into actual HDR tools etc).

This is the first time using the camera's "High (Extended) Full Well" mode. I haven't seen much information about it in the various forums, but in experimenting it seems to work even with HCG mode enabled. The read noise increases from ~1.4e to around ~1.7e but the full well seems to double (gain is likely halved e-/ADU). This gives a lot more dynamic range which is perfect for this object. There may be trade-offs in linearity etc, but I'm not sure how to do a full sensor analysis without continuing to write my own Python scripts. I know Dr. Robin Glover recently added native support into SharpCap , however I don't know how the gain is mapped to all of the various modes e.g. LCG/HCG *and* Normal Full Well / High Full Well etc... Some manufactures seem to allow a negative gain which maps to  LCG + High Full Well. Fortunately, N.I.N.A. exposes all of those features independently of the gain setting for maximum configuration flexibility (or confusion LOL).

I was very surprised that no pixels saturated at all despite bright Mag 2.66 Hatysa and the area around the Trapezium. I used 2 min subs with 4.5nm narrowband filters. I also took some RGB data with 1 second subs which also did not exceed about 80% of full-well capacity in this configuration. I use N.I.N.A.'s Lucky Imaging plugin with a sequence capturing 60x 1s subs in Lucky Imaging mode then grab a normal 1s exposure such that all the triggers continue to work like normal.  I turn off ROI mode and add in a 1s pause after the Lucky Capture command so it doesn't crash or lock-up. Works great and there is ZERO delay between short subs.

I extracted the stars from the RGB data as they have slightly better color and lower FWHM, and then recombined them in Siril with the HO narrow-band nebulosity data. I did not use any RGB for the nebulosity, so no "Running Man" reflection nebula shows up. The RGB subs are too short at 1s to "swamp the read noise" in the darker image areas, but seems okay for stars. Still experimenting with this.

I hope to install the ZWO EFW 7x2" and OGMA O'Tilter at some point and use Hocus Focus to dial in the tilt and back-focus. This plus more practice collimating will possibly improve the coma around the brighter edge stars.

Happy New Year!!!