This project started as an experiment. I have found previous attempts at M42 to be extremely difficult to capture the outer regions as well as the inner region by the trapezium without blowing out the inner part of the nebula. From my Photometry work, I knew the exposure times for the magintude of the trapezium stars and others for saturation level. I took 12 exposures of 6 different lengths; 2, 5, 10 20, 30, 60 and 120 seconds respectively. I then took the remaining session time with 240 second exposures. Each set was stacked separately. During Processing, the first thing to do was to create a sequence in Siril with all the stacked masters, then do a crop so all were identical in size. Followed by this was a registration of all the images. From this point, each stacked master was processed with the workflow below, being careful to keep the parameters of the stretch, denoise, sharpen the same. Every master went into darktable and again, the same tweaks were applied. The final step was in GIMP where I started with the shortest exposure and masked out everything except the best part of the image. This was done then consecutively with each longer exposure. As the process continued, the longer exposures, the mask was a doughnut of the best looking parts of the nebula. Using careful blending and feathering and adjustments of the opacity of the layers, I ended up with the final result. I was so pleased to be able to see the trapezium in the image! That was the main goal.

Processing: Deep Sky Stacker, Siril[VeraLux Nox, Cosmic Clarity, SyQon Prism, VeraLux Hypermetric Stretch, SyQon Starless, VeraLux Revela and Vectra]

Darktable for some subtle color adjustments then constructed back together in GIMP.

Seestar S30

Kodak disposable camera from k-mart. Purchased around 1997 for 12.99 - ISO400!