First picture of Deep Space: M42

Well very early this morning I had the telescope out and wanting to test out taking pictures of M42. My dad helped me get the telescope aligned with Polaris. I think I did a good job with it, being my first time. Don't know how well I did with the pose-processing.

Light:
2x30's at ISO 1000
10x30's at ISO 800
1x30's at ISO 1600
Dark:
6x30's at ISO 1000

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I don't know why you shot groups at different ISO's, generally you want to find the optimal ISO for your camera and the conditions you are shooting under and stick with that. Additionally, you want to shoot all your darks the same ISO that you shot your light frames, and preferably a 1:1 ratio.

The tracking and guiding look good but the purple color is wrong for this nebula which is rich in Hydrogen (H-a) as well as Oxygen III.
Looks like you adjusted the colors using Level and or Curves adjustment and turned off all the Green, and over-clipped the dark points too. Space is dark, Not pitch Black! Clipping the dark points too much is also removing good image data such as some of the fainter nebulous regions.
And I don't know what the blue is shining up from the bottom, it's almost as though there was a light shining from below wherever you were when you shot this.

Well like I said this was my first time, so any help would be great. When adjusting the lvl's, colors and so forth what should I be focusing on and adjusting. Also what do you mean my over-clipping the dark points.

devildog2222 wrote in post #11083668
Well like I said this was my first time, so any help would be great. When adjusting the lvl's, colors and so forth what should I be focusing on and adjusting. Also what do you mean my over-clipping the dark points.

Ideally you want to balance out the histogram on all color channels without clipping the dark points or blowing out the stars.
Over clipping means you clipped image data, in other words you in your attempt to make the background darker you made it too dark by turning down the dark points so much that you removed/deleted what might have been good image data.

The following information should help give you an idea of how to start your adjustments/histograms stretch.

Information courtesy of Jay Ballauer http://www.allaboutast​ro.com

Here are some screen shots of the curves and levels I'm talking about.
First, here is the type of curve that will bring up shadows yet preserve your stars...
http://www.allaboutast​ro.com …ges/rosette-log-curve.jpg
Yes, it brightens the background, but that will be reset by the following levels adjustment...
http://www.allaboutast​ro.com …/rosette-levels-reset.jpg
Notice the red arrow. I just dragged the slider a little closer to the hill. Go too close to the hill and you'll overly darken the background.
At the end of the process, you might end up with something like this...
http://www.allaboutast​ro.com …tte-final-adjustments.jpg
Notice two things. One, there's a lot of information in the background that would have disappeared if you left your background black. Two, notice the histogram, how it now gently slopes on the left, yet the hill doesn't extend much further on the right than it did. Because I adjusted curves, the histogram is redistributed, meaning that the shadows now have more of the values than before. Essentially, I've just awoken half of the image that wasn't there in the first place.

From there you can browse around the Internet looking at other pictures of the same object to get a better idea of how the colors and nebulosity should look.

I did some more adjusting, don't know if its any better. At least its not as purple as the first one. The next time I take pictures of M42, I guess to get more detail, I'll have to take a lot more pictures.

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Good work mate, really well done.

Now add more and more data to it and add some short lengths and layer them in photoshop to get the core as well as the outer clouds.

Really nice, best seen for a long time on here.

Also don't cut your blacks / levels.... In levels always make sure any adjustment you do do not clip the blacks, the left hand side of the level chat, otherwise you loose detail, it all looks to dark i the sky and it looks fake. A common mistake to make, i did it in the beginning as I thought the backround should be black and in reality it is far from it.

I think I might of fixed the black. Not sure when I look at the levels, there is some space on the left end.

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Nice
The corrected one looks a lot better.
Looks very similar to the one I did the last week.

LOL! I'll be shooting Orion when it comes up as well.
If I last that long...
kinda chilly out here.

devildog2222 wrote in post #11085224
I think I might of fixed the black. Not sure when I look at the levels, there is some space on the left end.

Sometimes you have to be careful about that. The histogram will indicate data to a certain point where it suddenly drops off, but, when we look carefully we can often see that it is indicating some faint data still, which will be represented by a thin line running along the bottom of the histogram toward the left. Sometimes that's just noise or sky-glow, while others it is a faint object or nebulosity that you want to keep.
The histogram will often do the same at the other end. Generally, I won't touch the bright points very much if any at all because that usually just blows out your stars.
In astroimages, other than stars and your brightest objects, the majority of your image data is going to be in the mid-tones to darker ranges.