Orion Nebula **Target:** Orion Nebula (M42) **Date:**…
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Orion Nebula
**Target:** Orion Nebula (M42)
**Date:** February 16, 2026
**Location:** near Galway, Ireland - Bortle 4 skies
**Conditions:** thin haze / slightly cloudy
**Acquisition:** ***12600 subs at 0.5s - f2.8 - ISO 1600***
**Total Integration:** 1h 45min
No tracking, manual reframing every few minutes.
**Camera:** Canon 1D X Mark III
**Lens:** Canon EF 400mm f2.8 L II
**Calibration:** 200 flats, synthetic bias, no darks.
**Processing:** mostly in Siril (calibration + registration + stacking took about 23.5 h):
* crop
* plate solve
* background extraction
* photometric colour calibration (since my sensor isn't supported for spectrophotometric colour calibration)
* StarNet2 for star removal
* VeraLux HyperMetric Stretch
* Cosmic Clarity for sharpening and denoising
* VeraLux Revela
* recomposition
final edits in Lightroom to try to rescue the blown highlights in the core
**Notes:**
I'm fairly new to astrophotography, and after weeks of non-stop rain I decided I have to capture M42 before it's too late. Now, maybe I'm slightly crazy, but since I really wanted to make this count, I drove 350 km for Bortle 4 skies, and collected \~200 GB of photos over 3 hours (including 200+ calibration frames each for flats, darks, bias, even dark flats).
After testing, I opted not to use dark frames due to the very short exposures of my lights (my lights and darks were pretty similar, and Siril warned me of a significant number of negative pixels (about 30%) after dark subtraction).
Also, since I read that for modern cameras it's apparently recommended to just use synthetic bias, I modified the OSC\_Preprocessing\_WithoutDark script to use synthetic bias (and compressed FITSEQ for disk space reasons).
When editing, I tried to use automation as much as possible, since I'm not comfortable doing manual stretching myself and quite frankly, I've no idea how to make manual stretching with either Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch Transformations or even just Histogram Transformation only remotely resemble what AutoStretch or VeraLux HyperMetric Stretch gives me (despite watching loads of Youtube tutorials).
Any feedback or suggestions for improvement if I ever do something like this again (or even just how to process my data differently) are very welcome!
#space
source
**Target:** Orion Nebula (M42)
**Date:** February 16, 2026
**Location:** near Galway, Ireland - Bortle 4 skies
**Conditions:** thin haze / slightly cloudy
**Acquisition:** ***12600 subs at 0.5s - f2.8 - ISO 1600***
**Total Integration:** 1h 45min
No tracking, manual reframing every few minutes.
**Camera:** Canon 1D X Mark III
**Lens:** Canon EF 400mm f2.8 L II
**Calibration:** 200 flats, synthetic bias, no darks.
**Processing:** mostly in Siril (calibration + registration + stacking took about 23.5 h):
* crop
* plate solve
* background extraction
* photometric colour calibration (since my sensor isn't supported for spectrophotometric colour calibration)
* StarNet2 for star removal
* VeraLux HyperMetric Stretch
* Cosmic Clarity for sharpening and denoising
* VeraLux Revela
* recomposition
final edits in Lightroom to try to rescue the blown highlights in the core
**Notes:**
I'm fairly new to astrophotography, and after weeks of non-stop rain I decided I have to capture M42 before it's too late. Now, maybe I'm slightly crazy, but since I really wanted to make this count, I drove 350 km for Bortle 4 skies, and collected \~200 GB of photos over 3 hours (including 200+ calibration frames each for flats, darks, bias, even dark flats).
After testing, I opted not to use dark frames due to the very short exposures of my lights (my lights and darks were pretty similar, and Siril warned me of a significant number of negative pixels (about 30%) after dark subtraction).
Also, since I read that for modern cameras it's apparently recommended to just use synthetic bias, I modified the OSC\_Preprocessing\_WithoutDark script to use synthetic bias (and compressed FITSEQ for disk space reasons).
When editing, I tried to use automation as much as possible, since I'm not comfortable doing manual stretching myself and quite frankly, I've no idea how to make manual stretching with either Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch Transformations or even just Histogram Transformation only remotely resemble what AutoStretch or VeraLux HyperMetric Stretch gives me (despite watching loads of Youtube tutorials).
Any feedback or suggestions for improvement if I ever do something like this again (or even just how to process my data differently) are very welcome!
#space
source
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