There are always tons of Orion’s posted this time of the year, I like to think mine is at least a little different. If you want to have a laugh, check this progression image out.

What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles. The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear brown in the featured image, while central glowing gas is highlighted in red. Over the next few million years much of Orion's dust will be slowly destroyed by the very stars now being formed, or dispersed into the Galaxy.

Source: APOD

Equipment:

• Takahasi FSQ-106EDX III

• Paramount MyT

• QSI683wsg + Astrodon filters

• Lodestar X2 OAG

Acquisition

• Luminance - 16x600" / 16x60” / 16x15”

• Red – 16x600” / 8x60”

• Green –16x600” / 8x60”

• Blue - 16x600” / 8x60”

Total integration time - ~11.4

Taken from the Deep Sky West Observatory in Rowe, New Mexico. A Bortle 2 site.

Processing:

• BPP

  • Combine flats, darks, and bias

• R/G/B processing

  • TGV is each from followed by MMT. My new favorite method of noise reduction. You can read more about it here.
  • Linear fit G and B to the R channel
  • Combine into RGB image
  • SCNR green
  • Masked Stretch, really helped bring out that faintness
  • HDRMultiscaleTransformation

• L processing

  • Masked Stretch
  • HDRMultisclaeTransformation
  • LHE with modified amounts and different wavelet layers as masks
  • MMT for sharpening with a L + star mask
  • Star reduction

• LRGB Processing

  • Combine L + RGB images
  • Curves on RGB/K and saturation
  • Finally TGV Denoise to get some straggling noise.

Probably one of my favorite images I have ever posted to this sub. I never thought I would be saying that about Orion’s Nebula either.

If you feel like looking at some of my other images or following me on social media, here is a shameless plug:

Instagram here