Orion Nebula

My attempt at Orion through a 70-200 IS in a really dark sky in Kilcoy, Australia. Single image
130mm
f2.8
5 seconds
ISO3200

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Good try.. certainly way beyond my first efforts, you're showing nice star colours, colour balance looks good and your background is just visible, all good.

I hope you don't mind, I suggest the following as next steps to improve.

1. use shorter frames or look at tracking (barn door trackers), you have elongated stars.

EDIT: thinking about it, your stars are dragged North-South, not East-West.. did you use a tripod?.. how was the camera supported?

2. focus is a bit out, focus is a known hard one, I have loads of tools for it but it still takes me 5 to 10 minutes to get focus right... be patient and prepared to test test test before committing to a shots, liveview on high magnification is good.
3. look into stacking.. Deep Sky Stacker seems to be the way to go.. I use IRIS but that has a steep learning curve. Aim for a decent amount of time, if you are still pre-tracking then try at least a minutes worth of exposure, once your are tracking half an hour or so should be your starting point.

Derek

Shorter exposure or tracking does keep stars from blurring.
You can also try a program like Focus Magic and use motion blur correction. This program corrects for motion blur due to the movement of the camera. You enter the degree off the movement and then try increasing pixels until the sharpness is best without new artifact.
The motion of the stars is similar to camera movement, so this can help.
Here is an example using 55 degrees and 6 pixels on your posted image.

tpocock wrote in post #16278759
Shorter exposure or tracking does keep stars from blurring.
You can also try a program like Focus Magic and use motion blur correction. This program corrects for motion blur due to the movement of the camera. You enter the degree off the movement and then try increasing pixels until the sharpness is best without new artifact.
The motion of the stars is similar to camera movement, so this can help.
Here is an example using 55 degrees and 6 pixels on your posted image.

Impressed!!
That produced a great recovery from the trailed stars
Not familiar with Focus Magic, mite have to give it a try

cheers
Dave

OK downloaded it and gave it a go on a couple of recent exposures

WOW seriously impressed. Think that is worth the US$45 to purchase. I noted it loaded a plugin into my PS Elements 11 as well

cheers
Dave

Good edit TP.
Focus Magic does magic.