Astrophotography Adventure (cont'd) - First Try at DSO

Before I begin the continuation of this series, I should mention that I have only being using the HQ JPEG option on NightCapPro.  I figure since I don't totally have a handle on what I'm doing, using TIFF would pretty much be a waste. But I do plan to use that lossless format once I've got the hang of things.

Having had some success with the Moon and Jupiter, I thought it was time to try a long exposure photo with my set-up of iPhone with NightCapPro (NCP) and Starblast 4.5 inch telescope.  So, it was time to try to image a DSO and the easiest DSO out there is probably the Orion Nebula, M42. I used the High ISO Boost on NCP and pushed it as high as it would go. And I set the interval program set to 3 individual shots of 15 seconds each with a 2 second delay between shots. I believe I used the 10MM eyepiece and tracking was on.  The results were beyond my wildest hopes - here is one of those three exposures:

I took the three exposures and stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker and then did some simple processing with GIMP:

Probably a little over processed and I'm definitely picking up some light pollution and noise - perhaps bringing down the ISO just a little bit would help with both; but, all in all, I'm extremely pleased with this, considering there were only 3 exposures and this was the first attempt.

On another note, the recent issue of Astronomy magazine has an article that discusses one of the questions I've always had when looking at these fabulous pictures of deep sky objects in particular, with their colors and contrasts. The question is "is that real?"  Since most DSO's just look like faint fuzzies to the visual observer, how can we know that these pictures are truly representative.  Adam Block does a wonderful job of explaining (you'll have to subscribe to read the whole article) how these images come from instruments much more receptive and perceptive than the human senses and, as with so much of science, bring to life things that are unseen. To quote, "(T)he quantity of light is not enough to fire our eyes' color receptors and allow us to discern the light's hues...(W)e use cameras to detect the details and colors the universe displays...The pictures are not so much enhanced as our biological constraints are diminished." To put it another way, these photos are accurate representations of details are eyes are unable to perceive.