M 42 - Trapezium Detail

[Jim McMillan]

Last night I was taking the RGB for my NGC 891 image posted last month. Well, the seeing was as steady as I've ever seen it at my location so I halted my Plan to take a few minutes of M 42 and see what kind of detail I could get in the Trapezium. My hope was that I could separate all 6 stars - specifically E and F, which I can't normally.

This image is 36, 3-second exposures with ddp and unsharp mask applied - probably too much if wanting a purely aesthetic image. The images were guided, but the guide exposure length was 11+ seconds long since I didn't take the time to locate a proper guide star. That effectively means that each exposure was unguided, but the group of exposures were kept from drifting over time.

Three seconds was still too long to eliminate blooming - see the artifacts in the stars on the left from the blooming removal software which I didn't correct.

While certainly not a very pretty picture, I'm pretty excited that I resolved stars E and F and it looks like I even got G and a hint of H1 and H2!

[edit] - I've replaced the original images with ones with a bit more careful processing that I think teases out a little more detail. Still not very pretty as images go...

Jim

[Bob Denny]

Nice going... and thanks for alerting me to this on the phone today :-))

[Dick Berg]

Hi Jim,

Were these images taken through a filter of any kind? Unbinned as well?

[Jim McMillan]

Hi Dick,

Clear filter, unbinned. If I ever do it again, I'll reduce the exposure length until there are no blooms. That'll probably be about 1.5 secs, so it will take a number of exposures - probably 100+.

Jim

[Dick Berg]

Jim, I was thinking of trying this, too. I missed a perfect opportunity tonight, andat midnight it's already cloudy. It'll probably not be clear until April, when Orion has sunk low in the west...

I thought I'd try imaging through a V or R filter, for a couple seconds for maybe a thousand images. What a processing adventure that would be. Might be a data storage problem too. (I wonder if MaxIm can stack that many!)

Thanks for your note.