This image was the result of a couple brief hours of image time in an otherwise bleak winter season. The Orion nebula is probably the "easiest" nebula for astrophotography, but it is elusive for me because it always coincides with un-usable weather. January 31 had 100% snow cover on the ground, which - I have learned - acts like a mirror that reflects the light pollution back up into the sky. During imaging, I measured about 17.0 mag/arcsec^2 on my sky meter (really bad!), and there was only a window of a couple hours between clouds anyway. The raw image data is just not great. I actually just stored the data for quite a while since I wasn't sure it was worth doing much with, but the result is still probably the best Orion nebula I've managed to do thus far (the bar is quite low). The background noise is beyond belief, but it was apparent even in the raw integration that this is the first time I have been able to get any glimpse whatsoever of the faint background nebulosity surrounding the main M42 sphere. I left the final image a little on the bright side to accentuate the background nebulosity as much as possible.

The image processing incorporates two new things for me - first, I ended up using the new NoiseXTerminator plugin for PixInsight. It is obvious from the forums that this plugin is rapidly gaining popularity - in this case, it is an "image-saver." I had made a few attempts to attack the background noise using various combinations of MLT and never really attained a result I liked; I'm sure my PixInsight processing skills aren't the best, but I think this was a challenging case to be sure. The result with NoiseXTerminator is not perfect, but far better than I could get otherwise (I used 0.55 for noise reduction and 0.40 for detail recovery for those who are interested). I also used the (relatively) new Generalized Hypberbolic Stretch plugin starting with an HDR image to keep the core region from getting too over-exposed. I'm still learning all the parameter space  in GHS, but it produced a much better balanced result than pure STF stretching.