Yesterday I saw Orion for the first time this winter. I took 50 shots of 180s at ISO 100 with the K3 II and the TS APO 80/480 mm. Had not much hope because the skies were hazy and the dammned streetlamp nearby is disturbing since the leafs are down.

This evening I trialed and errored a bit and experimented again with frequency separation in Photoshop.....and I am totally surprised what stuff hides in the dark data! Normally they use the technique to retiuche modells faces in Photoshop but it also works on stars.

Any comments or ideas welcome!

Wow!

Fantastic!

I am in awe.

Nice work Pete.

Really excellent. Great work! Preserves tons of detail without the pitfalls of HDR washout. Can you point us to any tutorials on this technique?

I am speachless! Congratulations!

Do you or have you considred use of any filters?

Thank you!

I have no filters but thought about using them. But my actual setup does not support easy solutions (like e. g. clip-on-filters for Canon cameras).Before I upgrade to filter wheel etc. I want to exhaust (right word for full usage?) my actual system. There is so much to improve......

At the moment I work on setup improvements to reduce the time and effort around the net photo time (optimize rig up and rig down) because I hate to loose so much precious exposure time while cabling, aligning etc. I am building an ALU STECK box as a "home" for my mount on the balcony pillar so that I can leave everything riged up betwen the sessions.

Next I want to implement steering of my mount by Stellarium just for the comfort. Have tested it, GREAT thing!

Thank you for the compliment!

There is no single tutorial for the method, it is more a deduction of several methods I practiced the last weeks.

There is no HDR-Technique involved.The underlying principle is to stepwise strip off elements that very much disturb the stretching process (noise, stars, halos) if it comes to really dark matter BUT preserving the "lost differences" of each step on distinct layers to later implement them again into the final image.

The separation of the elements is done gradually according to their frequency. That is why my working title for the method is "Frequency Grading".

A more detailed description of my workflow will follow asap.

Greetings
Pete

Thank you for the flowers......

A much more experienced stargazer from the local astro community told me that my colors of M42 are too fake in his eyes because the most of the light M42 is emitting comes from Ionisation in the H-Alpha band what causes the nebula to appear in reddish colors. He pushed me very friendly but insistent to shift the magenta color tones to this direction and desaturate the whole thing. It did not help me to claim that I had just used what came out of the Raw files without changing colors before . As it is red now he wants to publish it in his quarterly astro-magazine .

This is the result:



Probably he is right but I am missing the color bandwidth and structure of the first version a bit. Any comments to that and/or an idea why I come to intense blue and magenta colors while the real color is in the red region?

P.S: ...and please excuse the misspelling in the thread title that I realized but now. Of course it should read faint stuff...I obviously frequently have difficulties with the language........

Nice result for only 100iso & 180s

That is pretty darn good!

Great result, Pete. Color calibration is an important step in astro post-processing. Here is a link from the PixInsight documentation describing how they approach it:

PixInsight Reference Documentation | ColorCalibration

Jack

As the dust I was hunting for is very dark and the Trapezium Stars in the center M42 are extremely bright I wanted to gain maximum dynamic range and choosed ISO 100. And even with 180s at F6.0 they burned ounin the centert. I have to do another shot these days at ISO 100 and 90 seconds exposure to mix the darker heart of the nebula into the final image.