M42 The Great Orion Nebula

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Nebula

The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M42, or NGC 1976) is a diffuse nebula situated in the Milky Way, being south of Orion's Belt in the constellation of Orion.[b] It is one of the brightest nebulae, and is visible to the naked eye in the night sky. M42 is located at a distance of 1,344 ± 20 light years[3][6] and is the closest region of massive star formation to Earth. The M42 nebula is estimated to be 24 light years across. It has a mass of about 2,000 times that of the Sun. Older texts frequently refer to the Orion Nebula as the Great Nebula in Orion or the Great Orion Nebula.[7]

The Orion Nebula is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely studied celestial features.[8] The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers have directly observed protoplanetary disks, brown dwarfs, intense and turbulent motions of the gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars in the nebula.

This image is an integration of 54x300sec exposures for LRGB, and 12x180sec for a total integration time of 5.5 hrs.

The post processing on an object with such a large range of brightness is always challenging and open to the author's preferences. I have reworked the post processing multiple times to improve the detail, color palette, etc. I will continue to build the image dataset which should offer even more detail as the number of exposures build in the future.

I've tried some additional PixInsight techniques and did get some new detail exposed in the bright core. Unfortunately, the long exposure times have burned out any details on the Trapezium cluster in its center. I plan on some very short exposure in an attempt to capture that detail in the future, assuming that it is not beyond the reach of an OSC camera.