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