Target: Orion Nebula (M42)
Date: January 17, 2024
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Clear skies, 23°F, Wind: 10-15 mph, Moon: 2% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5
Integration: 360 x 60 seconds

I was so happy with my recent results of the Orion Nebula using my Dwarf 3 smart telescope that I grabbed my ASI533MC Pro and 60EDR telescope and embarked on another night of imaging.

To enhance the quality of my images, I enabled dithering on my Sky-Watcher SA GTi mount. This tells the mount to periodically move the telescope by a few pixels to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. By averaging out sensor artifacts and imperfections across multiple frames, dithering effectively reduces fixed-pattern noise, such as “walking noise,” hot pixels, and cosmic rays. This allows image stacking software to remove these unwanted elements, resulting in cleaner, higher-quality images.

While the SA GTi mount takes some time to settle, I managed to capture 6 hours of usable integration time. I used my Optolong L-eNhance filter to do some narrowband imaging, which worked extremely well. I was able to easily extract the Hydrogen-alpha (Ha) and Oxygen III (OIII) channels with DBXtract and recombined them with the Foraxx Utility and Narrowband Normalization. You’ll see these as distinct yellow and blue areas of the image representing the different wavelengths of light emitted in these regions of space.

The color palette in the image is quite vibrant, but I wanted to create something that truly stands out as I intend to print this image on a 20×30 acrylic.

Post-Processing Workflow

Software Used: PixInsight

Stacked in PixInsight with WBPP.
Dynamic Cropped Image.
Applied Seti Astro's AutoDBE.
Applied BlurXTerminator at default values.
Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
Applied NoiseXTerminator at 70% on starless image.
Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
Used MAS to stretch extracted images.
Combined Ha & OIII with Foray Palette Utility.
Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
Created Blue and Yellow masks.
Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.40 and SCNR checked.
Combined starless with star images with image blend script.
Exported as PNG.