Also during my first trial run of the veritable “light chariot,” we were able to easily find M42 in the Orion constellation. It very clearly presented itself as we trained the largest eyepiece I had on it. I had never viewed a nebula before on my own, so it was very exciting!
After the adrenaline subsided, we experimented with some other eyepieces. Settling on a 17mm, we took to taking many shots of differing ISO levels and shutter speeds. Most images came out poor, as the telescope would resonate for a bit after moving or focusing it. My patience was not strong enough to keep away from the shutter trigger as soon as I saw those four distinct stars in the camera’s preview screen.
I was able to pull together about 16 images and stack them using Siril. For my first time, I am impressed. After messing with pixel value levels a bit in Gimp, I was able to get the nebula to be clearly visible in the image.
The second image was produced by highly gaining the dim pixel values, and I dimmed the bright stars a bit. This shows the shape of the nebula more clearly. It also brings out the noise, which I will work on fixing by using dark and flat frames next time I try to photograph something dim.
