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Stellar Shot of the Week

Nicola Beltraminelli took this magnificent shot of M42 in Orion with his SVX180T.

m42-lrgb-v7-final-signed.jpg

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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        "I grant Stellarvue Inc. permission to use the attached image(s) on their website".

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