Messier 42, the Orion Nebula, is one of the most popular imaging targets in the night sky. With its bright core and incredible dust clouds, it’s also one of the more difficult ones to image well.
Join Canadian astrophotographer Paul Owen and SkyNews editor-in-chief Allendria Brunjes in this lesson of Subs and Stars, an eight-part video series for beginners about processing deep-sky images.
During this fifth session, we looked at the SkyNews Astroimage Editing Contest’s beautiful, complex data for Messier 42, the Orion Nebula. The dataset includes LRGB data of different exposure lengths as well as Hydrogen-alpha and Oxygen III data — and Paul explains how you can bring it all together in PixInsight. He also speaks about editing these astrophotos in Photoshop.
The hosts
Paul Owen was introduced to astrophotography in 2013, and bought his first serious telescope not knowing then what he would need — just know what he wanted to do.
After a very steep learning curve full of victories and disappointments, he started capturing images of night sky treasures. He began shooting sunrises, sunsets, moonrises, moonsets and various Moon phases, constellations, odd cloud formations and more. Diving deeper into the full spectrum of deep-sky astrophotography, he focused on these types of images around five years.
Since then, his night-sky imaging has improved. His images now appear in newspapers, calendars, magazines and websites, and he teaches online tutorials to others wanting to start their journey into astrophotography.
Allendria Brunjes, editor-in-chief of SkyNews, is a newbie when it comes to astrophotography. Working as a journalist for more than a decade, her background is in news photography.
She knows her way around Photoshop, and her DSLR has ridden on dirt bikes, worn cattle dung from bull auctions, felt heat from fires and almost fallen into more bodies of water than she cares to admit.
These days, Allendria’s camera and telescope are in dry bags awaiting the next canoe ride. She enjoys sketching night sky phenomena, and her astrophotography portfolio includes pictures of the Moon, aurora and eclipses. She is excited to learn about deep-sky image editing with the viewers of Subs and Stars.
This session was recorded on February 15, 2022 at 9 p.m. AST / 8 p.m. EST.
