Any moron can get a halfway decent shot of the Great Orion Nebula. I should know. I’m any moron.
I went out the other night to go for round 2 of trying to collimate my HyperStar lens. It was literally the first “clear” night in weeks. Who am I kidding? It was Olympia in February. It wasn’t all that clear. It was clear enough to get aligned and take a few shots to try to get the coma removed from my HyperStar images.
After getting everything setup, however, I noticed that Orion was just starting to make its way towards a very, very small patch of clear sky I get towards the southern horizon in my horrible, horrible backyard. Everything was set up and ready to go, so I decided to kill the collimation session and get as much of Orion as I could.
Of course, that’s also when the clouds started rolling in. Shooting between the trees and into a bank of high clouds, here’s an animation of what I was up against. There wasn’t a single moment when either clouds, or tree branches, or both weren’t conspiring to ruin everything:
I took 100 light frames at 10 seconds each, for a combined (and whopping!) 15 whole minutes of exposures. I ended up trashing about half of those 100 because they were too in the trees or too in the clouds. But given just how horrible the conditions were (I should also point out that Clear Sky Chart listed seeing conditions as “poor”), I was amazed at what came out after stacking:
Fair enough, I had to stretch the image to basically render the background black due to the shadows from the tree I was shooting through. But, still. It’s such an amazing object, not even I can mess it up. Looking forward to getting out of my backyard and to some place I have more than a few minutes to image and more than a few fewer trees to deal with.
Thank you for the smile! If you are just starting, you are doing GREAT! You have several recognizable images of Orion! Great start! Orion takes special consideration to get right because the bright nebula blows a lot of detail away.
It is not as easy as you thought, is it? There are a lot of details that make a lot of difference. It really isn’t as difficult as it seems to begin with. It really is just getting a lot of little things right at the same time. The trick is to learn from every mistake, and build on them.
Details matter. Calibration frames, especially flats, are very important. Easy to do once you figure it out. Focus masks will make a huge difference. Take the time to get it right. When you learn the tricks, it’s easy.
When you skip a step, or something is ‘close enough’, it probably isn’t. You won’t find out until morning that your night’s captures missed part of the target because you didn’t check your camera rotation, or you didn’t check your focus and the entire night is slightly out of focus.
Capturing the images is just the first step. It takes more work to take the night’s captures and turn them into an image show off. As your imaging gets better, your processing gets better. Don’t give up. Next year you will be blown away at the difference!
Thanks for the encouragement. It really is a million different things to try to get right, all at once. I started this site mainly for myself, so I can look back one day and see the progress. And yeah… learning FAST that calibration frames (and the right ones at that) are do or die. Cheers!