Night M42 a lucky single

M42 a lucky single · **10 Likes**

I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black.

M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can.

Pentax K5
exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100
Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s

I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use.

More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography

Cheers!

**jbinpg** · 11-29-2019, 12:16 AM - **1 Like**

Gorgeous image!

**blues_hawk** · 11-29-2019, 04:26 PM

Thanks everybody! I had no idea how much attention this would get. It appears to have gone a bit viral in facebook too based on my notifications thingy...whatever that is. :P

arqjaviergarcia · 11-29-2019, 10:52 PM

What a great shot, this is very interesting image, can't wait to lear about how get a image like this.

**blues_hawk** · 11-30-2019, 10:11 AM

Originally posted by arqjaviergarcia

What a great shot, this is very interesting image, can't wait to hear about how get a image like this.

Thanks. I plan to write a bit more about that. I did a little critique of these at the other one I posted.

I'm also hoping to get time to write at length how I got to this point which I will eventually also share at PF. Outreach and writing has been part of my agenda since I started with a webcam on a tripod some years ago. I felt like the budget numbers were too high for doing AP and I'm happy to report that it CAN be done without breaking the bank, and indeed for less than a families worth of apple i-stuff. 80% of it is knowledge and practice. the rest is DIY ...and lots of coupons and sales. --and avoiding mistakes and money pits. :P

**TedH42** · 11-30-2019, 05:35 PM

That's a single shot? 15 minutes? WOW! That's some tracking. Great nebulosity on a difficult subject!

Flats, darks, bias? No talk of those here. That's some great processing! I'll have to read up on your technique.

A fine image. Definitely a monster. Thanks.

pentaxshooter89 · 11-30-2019, 05:36 PM

Originally posted by blues_hawk

I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black.

M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can.

Pentax K5
exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100
Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s

I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use.

More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography

Cheers!

Very bice

**ThomSirveaux** · 11-30-2019, 09:33 PM

Originally posted by blues_hawk

I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black.

M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can.

Pentax K5
exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100
Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s

I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use.

More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography

Cheers!

I would want to print this out, but damn if it wouldn't use up all the black on my Pixma

**blues_hawk** · 11-30-2019, 11:06 PM

Originally posted by TedH42

That's a single shot? 15 minutes? WOW! That's some tracking. Great nebulosity on a difficult subject!

Flats, darks, bias? No talk of those here. That's some great processing! I'll have to read up on your technique.

A fine image. Definitely a monster. Thanks.

Thanks yourself! Now that you mention it, I do usually use bias frames(as a stacked master) and a master-flat taken with the same setup on a clear daytime sky with a t-shirt over the front, and I'm pretty sure I did on this one, though the both were from a previous session several weeks before. It looked better with than without so they stayed in the process train. I often retry from captured several times to see what effect different techniques have. Even using the green noise removal tool in Siril can have varying results if it's used at different orders, i.e. before or after color calibration, or even after stretching the histogram(which is what gain really does.

**blues_hawk** · 11-30-2019, 11:08 PM

For anyone who isn't familiar with flats and bias, they calibrate white and black levels for the particular camera you are using, and flatten the background to make managing it easier when tying to tease out the little hidden bits from the shadows. Dark frames usually aren't needed with the K5. They don't seem to do much good and I've seen them do bad when conditions changed during a session, so I don't use them as much on my Pentax as I do on the astrocams.

**Ash** · 12-01-2019, 04:59 AM - **1 Like**

Originally posted by blues_hawk

I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black.

M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can.

Pentax K5
exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100
Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s

I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use.

More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography

Cheers!

Oh my!
AMAZING!

**blues_hawk** · 12-05-2019, 08:44 AM

Originally posted by Ash

Oh my!
AMAZING!

Thanks!

Note to all: I was working on a redo of this to see if I could integrate any other shots I have(rejection stacking) and discovered Either I've lost the original, or had the time wrong on this one. I have stacked 300s,180s and a single 300 second image all at 100iso, but no 900second for this one, so it looks like this one may have been 300 seconds and not 900 seconds as I reported. It was a single, the stack doesn't look any different, and the m31 is for sure a single 900. --this means there might be an even better one in the future if I can get all 50 things needed to line up again before the end of the winter target season* I'm thinking 2:30am and excited may have been a factor. I also now think I was thinking the bright region might hit full well if I went too long. We'll have to wait till the next new moon and hope for good weather.

I hope this doesn't cause any lawsuits. :P

*(DST in march--grumblegrumblecretinsgrumble).

**blues_hawk** · 12-05-2019, 08:58 AM

One other thought on this. UHC is a broadband filter I often use to suppress white bright regions and light pollution. I found it very helpful on targets with very wide dynamic range like m42. It's considered less useful on Amdromeda but was in place at the time.

**Archimedes the Dog** · 12-05-2019, 09:07 AM

Beautiful, glad you stayed at it!

**blues_hawk** · 12-05-2019, 11:23 AM

Originally posted by Archimedes the Dog

Beautiful, glad you stayed at it!

Thank you!
I can't wait to try an even longer exposure(or 8) to see what happens. I'm still thinking it will get too bright in the middle even at iso100 but the K5 sensor has this hugely deep well at low gain so we'll see. As I said in my OP this one has been my nemesis, with such a wide dynamic range, all bright reflection nebula in the middle, dark emission nebula gas on the outside. I'm still excited to have finally conquered the noise monster. WOOT!

aitrus3 · 12-05-2019, 05:21 PM

Originally posted by blues_hawk

I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black.

M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can.

Pentax K5
exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100
Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s

I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use.

More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography

Cheers!

Nice job Blues Hawk. Well done! Love the flares!

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11-29-2019, 12:16 AM - 1 Like	#16
jbinpg Site Supporter Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: Prince George, BC Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 3,546	Gorgeous image!

11-29-2019, 04:26 PM	#17
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	Thanks everybody! I had no idea how much attention this would get. It appears to have gone a bit viral in facebook too based on my notifications thingy...whatever that is. :P

11-29-2019, 10:52 PM	#18
arqjaviergarcia Senior Member Join Date: Jan 2015 Posts: 138	What a great shot, this is very interesting image, can't wait to lear about how get a image like this.

11-30-2019, 10:11 AM	#19
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	Originally posted by arqjaviergarcia What a great shot, this is very interesting image, can't wait to hear about how get a image like this. Thanks. I plan to write a bit more about that. I did a little critique of these at the other one I posted. I'm also hoping to get time to write at length how I got to this point which I will eventually also share at PF. Outreach and writing has been part of my agenda since I started with a webcam on a tripod some years ago. I felt like the budget numbers were too high for doing AP and I'm happy to report that it CAN be done without breaking the bank, and indeed for less than a families worth of apple i-stuff. 80% of it is knowledge and practice. the rest is DIY ...and lots of coupons and sales. --and avoiding mistakes and money pits. :P

11-30-2019, 05:35 PM	#20
TedH42 F/8 & Somewhere Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Colorado Photos: Gallery Posts: 1,412	That's a single shot? 15 minutes? WOW! That's some tracking. Great nebulosity on a difficult subject! Flats, darks, bias? No talk of those here. That's some great processing! I'll have to read up on your technique. A fine image. Definitely a monster. Thanks.

11-30-2019, 05:36 PM	#21
pentaxshooter89 Veteran Member Join Date: May 2011 Location: Oregon Posts: 365	Originally posted by blues_hawk I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black. M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can. Pentax K5 exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100 Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use. More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography Cheers! Very bice

11-30-2019, 09:33 PM	#22
ThomSirveaux Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Apr 2018 Posts: 607	Originally posted by blues_hawk I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black. M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can. Pentax K5 exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100 Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use. More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography Cheers! I would want to print this out, but damn if it wouldn't use up all the black on my Pixma

11-30-2019, 11:06 PM	#23
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	Originally posted by TedH42 That's a single shot? 15 minutes? WOW! That's some tracking. Great nebulosity on a difficult subject! Flats, darks, bias? No talk of those here. That's some great processing! I'll have to read up on your technique. A fine image. Definitely a monster. Thanks. Thanks yourself! Now that you mention it, I do usually use bias frames(as a stacked master) and a master-flat taken with the same setup on a clear daytime sky with a t-shirt over the front, and I'm pretty sure I did on this one, though the both were from a previous session several weeks before. It looked better with than without so they stayed in the process train. I often retry from captured several times to see what effect different techniques have. Even using the green noise removal tool in Siril can have varying results if it's used at different orders, i.e. before or after color calibration, or even after stretching the histogram(which is what gain really does.

11-30-2019, 11:08 PM	#24
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	For anyone who isn't familiar with flats and bias, they calibrate white and black levels for the particular camera you are using, and flatten the background to make managing it easier when tying to tease out the little hidden bits from the shadows. Dark frames usually aren't needed with the K5. They don't seem to do much good and I've seen them do bad when conditions changed during a session, so I don't use them as much on my Pentax as I do on the astrocams.

12-01-2019, 04:59 AM - 1 Like	#25
Ash Loyal Site Supporter Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Toowoomba, Queensland Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 23,920	Originally posted by blues_hawk I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black. M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can. Pentax K5 exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100 Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use. More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography Cheers! Oh my! AMAZING!

12-05-2019, 08:44 AM	#26
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	Originally posted by Ash Oh my! AMAZING! Thanks! Note to all: I was working on a redo of this to see if I could integrate any other shots I have(rejection stacking) and discovered Either I've lost the original, or had the time wrong on this one. I have stacked 300s,180s and a single 300 second image all at 100iso, but no 900second for this one, so it looks like this one may have been 300 seconds and not 900 seconds as I reported. It was a single, the stack doesn't look any different, and the m31 is for sure a single 900. --this means there might be an even better one in the future if I can get all 50 things needed to line up again before the end of the winter target season* I'm thinking 2:30am and excited may have been a factor. I also now think I was thinking the bright region might hit full well if I went too long. We'll have to wait till the next new moon and hope for good weather. I hope this doesn't cause any lawsuits. :P *(DST in march--grumblegrumblecretinsgrumble).

12-05-2019, 08:58 AM	#27
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	One other thought on this. UHC is a broadband filter I often use to suppress white bright regions and light pollution. I found it very helpful on targets with very wide dynamic range like m42. It's considered less useful on Amdromeda but was in place at the time.

12-05-2019, 09:07 AM	#28
Archimedes the Dog Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2013 Location: Boise, ID Posts: 1,146	Beautiful, glad you stayed at it!

12-05-2019, 11:23 AM	#29
blues_hawk Site Supporter Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Patrick Co. Virginia Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,534 Original Poster	Originally posted by Archimedes the Dog Beautiful, glad you stayed at it! Thank you! I can't wait to try an even longer exposure(or 8) to see what happens. I'm still thinking it will get too bright in the middle even at iso100 but the K5 sensor has this hugely deep well at low gain so we'll see. As I said in my OP this one has been my nemesis, with such a wide dynamic range, all bright reflection nebula in the middle, dark emission nebula gas on the outside. I'm still excited to have finally conquered the noise monster. WOOT!

12-05-2019, 05:21 PM	#30
aitrus3 Pentaxian Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Kamloops B.C. Photos: Gallery \| Albums Posts: 1,432	Originally posted by blues_hawk I seem to have proven once again that Space is indeed not black. M42 is also known as "The Great Orion Nebula" but I call it my nemesis. I'm very excited by this year's earliest effort and had to share it everywhere. After a long night battling my usual string of difficulties(balance, bad cable, pc lockup at 18sec remaining,focus, mount leg slipped, polar alignment etc.) I finally noticed that orion had passed above the 40+ degree mark needed to clear my trees about 2:00am. Having had a few decent guiding runs and a guiding indicator target full of sub 1arc second hits, I decided to stay up and give it a try. Glad I did. 15 minutes later I had this monster in the can. Pentax K5 exposure: 900 seconds @ iso100 Skywatcher EQ6r-pro mount guided by a converted finder scope+asi120s I used Opensource software Siril ,RAWTherapee, and GIMP to remove green, noise, color calibrate, stretch, asinh stretch and resize for web use. More about my move to using Super long exposure or "SLE" can be read at Smith River Photography Cheers! Nice job Blues Hawk. Well done! Love the flares!