M42 ORION NEBULA
14th DECEMBER 2003
A second processing attempt, The histogram was adjusted to reduce the burn out in the central area and an unsharp mask used on the brighter noise free areas. Two passes of applying the L to the RGB image were used (LLRGB) . No colour correction was applied. The blue halo round the brightest stars, caused by the short focal length achromat are more pronounced, but overall I feel this version is an improvement
Taken with the "PIPCAM" SC1 modified Vesta Pro webcam and the 80mm f5 wide field refractor. An IR blocking filter was used. A combination of 30x 40sec and 30x 10sec frames were used to cover the wide dynamic range in this object. K3CCD tools was used for capture, alignment and stacking and initial gamma increase. AVIDark was used to subtract the dark frames and correct the hot pixels. Photoshop was used to adjust the colours, fine tune the histogram, blur the noiser faint outer regions and construct the LRGB image using the greyscale composite as the L. Loreal was used to remove the "ears" artifacts caused by the webcam software round the stars.
