M42 via online observing session!

Note: The live streaming services provided was called Night Skies Network, and NOT NightSkyNetworks as stated on the photo (left). My mistake.I will make the necessary correction as soon as possible.

I attended the virtual online observation by Rock Mallin via the really cool Night Sky Networks Night Skies Network. It was way late at night in Canada, while I was comfortably having my breakfast here in Kuala Lumpur!

The setup used was a 16 inch LX200 coupled with MFR-5 and using the new Mallincam VSS. Integration setting was 2 seconds.

We were looking at M42, and the live view itself was wild! As mentioned by one of the attendees, it looked pretty much 3D!

The dust lanes (or clumps) really pops up in front of the trapeziums!

I couldn't resist capturing some of the frames and stacked it up. The photo speaks by itself!
It was a combination of 20 frames each at 2 sec integration. So, in all a total of 40 SECONDS! exposure time! Whew!!!

The VSS seems to be displaying nicely. There's no darks or flats included during the process. I used DeepSkyStacker for stacking, which seems to be working very well and compensating the field-rotation effect, as compared to Registax.

The final TIFF file was then open in Registax which has much better post-processing tools.

It was a truly inspiring session. As pointed out by Rock, the Mallincam not only is a very effective tool for outreach activities , but with a little effort in post-processing, can reveal an enormous amount of details!


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