We’ve had a few clear intervals over the past couple of weeks and I took some pictures of Orion with my Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 lens during one of them. I managed an hours worth of 10 minute frames and rejected one for an airplane in the image. After stacking, a simple stretch showed the light pollution that’s in my southern sky from the local town. Limiting magnitude was about 4.8.

Both automatic and dynamic background removal tools were run in Pixinsight. Despite this, some glow remains in the bottom left corner where the gradient was most severe. A star reduction procedure reduced the intensity of the field stars and then the large scale structures were isolated and increased in saturation and lightness to emphasize Barnard’s Loop.

This is another reprocess of old data, this time of IC405 and IC420 along with the bright stars 16, 17, 18 & 19 Auriga between the nebulae.

The original post was here. Using Pixinsight, with final levels and saturation boost in Photoshop this is the new result.

Halfway between Perseus and Cassiopia and embedded in the Milky Way is this double nebula. This is the result of 4.5 hours of exposure gathered over two nights on my Astrotrac. Individual exposures are 10 minutes each through a Canon 75-300 lens at 135mm.

Processing was done in Maxim DL and Pixinsight. The image suffers quite badly from chromatic aberration and the stars have red halos that I’ve not been able to fully supress.