The Great Orion Nebula

With a bit of a “false spring” about to end—it’s been very mild in my neck of the woods, but that is about to change soon—I took advantage of a clear, steady, and moonless sky to have another try at imaging Messier 42, a.k.a. the Great Orion Nebula.

I’ve been very lazy with getting out with my telescopes this winter, and I decided I needed to get out at least once to try imaging M42 with my Canon EOS R8 attached to my Questar telescope. One thing I’ve grown to love about my R8 is its incredible sensor. Its low-light performance is the best I’ve ever seen in a camera that I’ve owned. I need all the low-light performance I can get: my Questar operates photographically at f/16 with no way to speed up that focal ratio. Shooting deep sky astronomical objects can indeed be a challenge with that scope.

This is the out-of-camera JPEG:

And the processed raw file:

Using the camera’s raw data helps enormously. I cropped the image, increased brightness by a stop, switched to Canon’s “faithful” picture style, made adjustments to black point/midpoint/white point values, decreased contrast in order to bring out the more delicate areas of the nebula a bit more, bumped up color saturation a touch, and increased clarity.

This image is a significant improvement over the one I posted last winter. The difference between my Canon EOS M200 and my R8 is massive.