M42 in H-α, OIII, SII; 7th March 2011

This is another false-colour image of M42 made by combining pictues taken through H-α, OIII, and SII filters. The pictures were taken almost by chance. I had been doing some checks with the focal reducer attached to my LX200 and had a little time to spare so I turned the telescope onto M42 and took six pictures through the CLS filter and two each through the three narrow-band filters.

The pictures were taken with my MX716, which is more sensitive than the other cameras I have used with this object, and enhanced using the mx7 software before aligning the pictures in RegiStax and combining them in Photoshop. The assignment of the three pictures to the three colours is arbitary, but I have stayed with my convention of assigning the H-α picture to the red channel, the OIII to green, and the SII to blue. The object shown at the top of the picture is M43.

To see the individual pictures from which this was made, click on the picture.

Date and Time 7th March 2011 19:33 to 19:47 UT

Camera Starlight Xpress MX716

Telescope LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer with Astronomik H-α, OIII, and SII filters

Capture star_mx7. L image: 0.5, 1, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 seconds
R, G, B images: 20 and 30 seconds exposure.

Processing Each set of images alligned and stacked in RegiStax 5. The L image only was enhanced with wavelets 1 - 2 = 5
The four resulting images were combined in Photoshop using the LRGB technique.

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Date and Time	7th March 2011 19:33 to 19:47 UT
Camera	Starlight Xpress MX716
Telescope	LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer with Astronomik H-α, OIII, and SII filters
Capture	star_mx7. L image: 0.5, 1, 2.5, 5, 10, and 20 seconds R, G, B images: 20 and 30 seconds exposure.
Processing	Each set of images alligned and stacked in RegiStax 5. The L image only was enhanced with wavelets 1 - 2 = 5 The four resulting images were combined in Photoshop using the LRGB technique.