The Horsehead and Flame Nebulae in Orion

A hidden treasure in Orion's Belt. I was only able to get ~48 minutes of integration time. I hope the next time I can gather more data. This was my first time gathering data for these objects. This data was taken on 12.16.2020. When I first attempted to process it I became frustrated. I attempted again with PixInsight and it has made me want to shoot it again with more time.

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-s - shot at f/5.6

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

15 x 195" for 48 min and 45 sec of exposure time.

5 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bias frames

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

PixInsight

Lightroom

Photoshop

 

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap I then mounted my a7rIII and adapted Nikon 500mm f/4 P AI-S lens to the top rail of my scope. I used SharpCap to achieve "excellent" polar alignment. I shot ISO 1600, f/5.6 and 195" exposures. I brought the lights/darks/flats/bias frames into PixInsight for stacking and aligning and then used: STF, Cropping, Dynamic Background Extraction, BlurXTerminator, plate solving, color correction, NoiseXTerminator and then the DSO was separated from the stars, and both files processed and stretched separately and then recombined using PixelMath. That file was brought into Lightroom for Metadata and EXIF tags, light post-processing, and cropping to the final image..

Done