Description

This was the first DSO I shot when I first got my DSLR last May - back then I was still on the Alt / Az NexStar mount, and while I was impressed at the time at being able to obtain 50-second exposures that close to the poles, the image was still noisy, discolored, and lacked detail.

I almost wish I had waited one more month to shoot this pair - with a recently acquired AT72ED, I think I could manage long enough exposures with a wide enough field to capture the background dust ebbing through the fields of this pair. I may revisit it again next year, the temptation to retry old objects with new equipment is strong, as it would be a good metric of improvement, but there are too many interesting objects up there to repeat the old ones too often.

Processing this photo was somewhat challenging - I used only Photoshop for post (post stacking, anyway), but my difficulty with a previous M42 project taught me a lot on its usage in stretching astrophotos into something beautiful. I am not completely satisfied on the color for this one and had to make special effort to turn the galactic center back to yellow (it had turned a dull red for some reason), so I may try some edits in Lightroom in the near future.

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July Reprocess in PixInsight:

- Crop, several passes of DBE, LinearFit to Green, Channel Recombine, Luminance Extracted

- pseudo Luminance: Decon, TGVD, MMT (Rista), Masked Stretch + Histogram Transformation, ACDNR (Rista), MMT for sharpening, LRGB Combination

- Color: Photometric Color Calib, Background Neut, TGVD/MMt (Rista), ArcSinH + Masked Stretch, ACDNR (Rista), MMT for sharpening, LRGB Combination, Curves tweaks for color