(042) Great Orion Nebula
Speechless! :-O
100 30-second exposures (totalling 50 minutes) shot under computer control with a Nikon D40 at the prime focus of a Celestron NexStar 102 SLT 4-inch refractor (I was actually sleeping while this was happening!).
I used the astrometry.net software to solve each of the 100 photos, then the Swarp program to reproject and co-add the 100 red images, 100 green images, and 100 blue images in “SUM” mode.
The resulting three 32-bit FITS files (one per channel) were converted to a single 16-bit RGB TIFF file using ImageMagick convert, and then loaded into qtpfsgui to tone map as an HDR, using the Mantiuk algorithm with contrast 0.01, saturation 1.5, detail 4.0, and gamma 0.8.
Some minor post-processing with The Gimp and there you have it!!
The dimmest stars are around magnitude 16.
(042) Great Orion Nebula
Speechless! :-O
100 30-second exposures (totalling 50 minutes) shot under computer control with a Nikon D40 at the prime focus of a Celestron NexStar 102 SLT 4-inch refractor (I was actually sleeping while this was happening!).
I used the astrometry.net software to solve each of the 100 photos, then the Swarp program to reproject and co-add the 100 red images, 100 green images, and 100 blue images in “SUM” mode.
The resulting three 32-bit FITS files (one per channel) were converted to a single 16-bit RGB TIFF file using ImageMagick convert, and then loaded into qtpfsgui to tone map as an HDR, using the Mantiuk algorithm with contrast 0.01, saturation 1.5, detail 4.0, and gamma 0.8.
Some minor post-processing with The Gimp and there you have it!!
The dimmest stars are around magnitude 16.