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This is the Great Orion Nebula, M42. I realized this is fairly easy to see with a sufficient optical boost from my backyard which is roughly Bortle 6/7. This is my second night trying to image this object (or any DSO, actually).

This is a stack of 10x88-second exposures (roughly 15 minutes total exposure time). Polar-alignment on my SkyGuider Pro proved to be a bit difficult (once I added the camera and counter balance I had to re-align), so this 15 minutes is the result of me fiddling for an hour and a half or so. I did all the processing for this photo using libre software. Camera/lens correction in RawTherapee, aligned using align_image_stack in Hugin, average stacking using G’MIC, final stacked image tone curve/RGB curve/saturation adjustments in RawTherapee.

EXIF
ExposureTime 88
FNumber 2.8
Description This is the Great Orion Nebula, M42. I realized this is fairly easy to see with a sufficient optical boost from my backyard which is roughly Bortle 6/7. This is my second night trying to image this object (or any DSO, actually). This is a stack of 10x88-second exposures (roughly 15 minutes total exposure time). Polar-alignment on my SkyGuider Pro proved to be a bit difficult (once I added the camera and counter balance I had to re-align), so this 15 minutes is the result of me fiddling for an hour and a half or so. I did all the processing for this photo using libre software. Camera/lens correction in RawTherapee, aligned using align_image_stack in hugin, average stacking using G’MIC, final stacked image tone curve/RGB curve/saturation adjustments in RawTherapee
Title Orion Nebula, M42
FocalLength 200.0 mm
CreateDate 2018-02-17 20:34:58
Lens 70-200mm f/2.8
ISO 400
Model NIKON D610
Make NIKON CORPORATION