Stellar Shot of the Week
Nicola Beltraminelli took this magnificent shot of M42 in Orion with his SVX180T.
This diffuse nebula is located in our Milky Way galaxy and is about 24 light-years across. It lies 1,500 light-years away, making it the closest massive star formation to Earth.
According to Nicola:
"About the processing, the objective of this work was to generate an image including both, the extremely bright region of the trapezium, as well as the very dim nebulas surrounding M42 and M43. I thus took 1 second, 5 seconds, 60 seconds and 300 seconds subs in LRGB and then generated a separate layer for each one of them. I then used SPCC to match the color of the stars and of the nebula. At that point I generated as many as 7 RGB and 7 L layer masks in PS, so to avoid burning the core while highlighting the very dim regions. Achieving the right contrast/brightness balance for each layer to avoid brutal light transitions was definitely very challenging."
Click here to learn more and get an in depth look at this image on Astrobin.
Filters:
Chroma Blue 50 mm
Chroma Clear 50 mm
Chroma Green 50 mm
Chroma Red 50 mm
Software:
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Photoshop
Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight
Stefan Berg Nighttime 'N' Astronomy (N.I.N.A./NINA)
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