Orion Captured in Color

I spent last night at the White River Sno-park about 6 miles east of Government camp on Hwy 35. It's just a big parking lot which is almost completely unvisited this time of the year. Of course my goal was to complete the quest that began on Sunday to image M42 in Orion. This time I powered down the computer with about 72% computer battery life remaining (around midnight) and waited for Orion to come up over the eastern hills. I spent my battery's first 28% on the Veil (West) Nebula after having captured the "East" version last Sunday. That image is as yet unprocessed because I spent all of my time so far on M42.

I'm learning something new each time I go out. I learned this time how to use the "auto-grab" feature to capture color images... manually selecting the filter before the "grab". I took exposures at 5", 15", 30", 60", 90" and 120" and found that blooming (over-exposure) of stars was very bad on the blue filter at 120" and bad at 90". When I got back I found that they were also present at 60". After seeing the blooming I spent the rest of the night gathering 30" exposures with RGB and Clear filters, getting about twenty four exposures in all (12 minutes). The challenge now is finding the best way to calibrate, register, stack, and RGB-combine all of them. With the software I have (CCDOps and DeepSkyStacker) it looks like a very difficult task.

I did just find out that I can easily fix the blooming artifacts using a utility in CCDOps and this has enabled me to produce the image above from the single 120" exposure. Sorry... no RG colorblind version yet. Had I know they would have been this easy to fix I would have taken more of them. Given that I have six times more data than what is contained in the image above, I believe I should be able to improve the image significantly with more work... but it won't be any time soon. I think this is why most imagers talk about image processing being their "winter project".

Wind and the moon are returning, so last night was my last night imaging with the 80mm refractor for at least another month. If the weather ends up being good, I'll go to SkyView Acres in October. I may try to set up my 8" SCT in the back yard (moon or no moon) if the weather permits, just to start debugging that setup and appreciating the difficulties associated with a longer focal length scope.