First attempt at deep sky object... Orion M42

[AKVet]

Trying my hand at deep space objects.

• ILCE-7RM5
• FE 300mm F2.8 GM OSS
• 300.0 mm
• ƒ/2.8
• 30 sec
• ISO 640

 

[DaveC Oz]

Very nice

 

[Richard A]

Can you give us some info about how you took/processed this?

 

[AKVet]

Can you give us some info about how you took/processed this?

Hi Richard...

I am really just a novice at astro-photography, so take my info with a grain of salt.

I used a star tracker (Benro Polaris Astro) and took about 30 shots using a 300mm f/2.8 30sec iso 640. I also took 10 dark frames. I did some minor adjustments to the light frames in Light Room and sync'd the images. I then exported them to TIFFs and exported them to stack in Starry Landscape Stacker. I then opened the final stacked image in LR where I did a bit more editing. I opened the image in PS and created a layer where I used a plug-in called Star XTerminator to remove the stars so that I could just work on the nebula without affecting the stars. I was quite surprised that I got so much red without an astro-modified camera. I then selected the "stars-only" layer and blended the starless layer with the color dodge selection to do some star reduction. Back to LR for a bit more editing.

I basically used the same workflow for processing that I use for milky way shots.

A lot of serious astro-photographers like to use PixInsight to process astro images with great results. The software has a bit of a learning curve. I don't know how to use it, though, someday I would like to give it a try.