Target: Orion Nebula (M42)
Date: January 15, 2026 - January 18, 2026
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Clear skies, 23-44°F, Wind: 10-15 mph, Moon: 8% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5

It’s that time of year, when we turn our scopes to almost everyone’s first DSO target, the Orion Nebula. I first photographed the Orion Nebula in 2021 with my Sony A6300 mirrorless camera and Rokinon 135mm lens. The nebula was so small, and there was so much noise in the image. I knew nothing about stacking, calibration frames, or star tracking, but it ignited my love of astrophotography. So like many, I return each year to gaze at Orion and feel that same joy as the first time I photographed it.

After 2 nights of imaging I was able to collection 2008 × 15 second subs on my Dwarf 3 for just over 8 hours to total imaging time. While it was very dark with just about no moon over the two nights, the wind was pretty rough and blew around the Dwarf 3 leading to a ton of failed frames. I probably lost 25% of my subs.

For this image I used a process of extracting the Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract and created an SHO palette with Foraxx Palette Utility and Narrowband Normalization. I’ll probably come back with another stack at a lower gain setting so I can recover some of the core detail which is blown out here, but it’s a pretty good start for the year.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve this image!

Post-Processing Workflow

Software Used: Siril & PixInsight

Stacked in Siril using Naztronomy's smart telescope script.
Cropped Image.
Applied AutoDBE and debanding in Siril. Exported .fit file for further processing in PixInsight
Applied BlurXTerminator at max values.
Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
Applied NoiseXTerminator at 90% on starless image.
Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
Used Seti Astro's statistical stretch 2.0.0 to stretch images.
Combined Ha & OIII with Foray Palette Utility.
Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
Created Blue and Yellow masks.
Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.25 and SCNR checked.
Combined starless with star images with pixel math using ~(~SL*~S).
Exported as PNG.