M42 I Have Found You

Got up this morning at 5.30. Clear skies and markedly clearer than the previous evening. The constellation of Orion was staring back at me poised proudly above my shed. I dragged out my pre-prepared set up into my back garden and after 10 minutes or so of polar aligning and activating my astrotrac, I effortlessly trained my Canon 400D with 300mm, f6.3 lens onto the Orion Nebula. A quick 30 second shot confirmed I had M42 nicely centered and I subsequently used DSLR Pro to time-lapse a series of 30 second exposures at 40 second intervals. Here is a picture of my first shot:

DSLR Pro was set up to progressively download the pictures onto my laptop. With everything automated to run for about an hour or so i retreated to cozy warmth of my living room and settled down to some toast and coffee and the company of my wife.

6.40, I started packing up while I left the camera taking some darks.

I then used DeepSkyStacker to stack 35 lights (actual images of the nebula) and 15 darks (same set up but with the lens cap on). Then I processed the final stacked picture in photoshop CS2, adjusting each of the levels for R, G and B and finally fiddling around with curves. And here she is.