Orion, the Hunter

I woke this morning at a little before 3am. No idea why, but it decided I might as well make some use of it, and so I grabbed my camera and tripod. I decided to see what happened with my Pentax-M 50mm instead of the Sigma 30mm: narrower field, less time before stars would begin to trail, and maximum aperture one stop smaller. As it happened, that effective 75mm focal length was just the right size to frame Orion fairly nicely. 75 mm meant a maximum shutter opening of 8" - which as it happens, was what I used on my Sigma the last time I shot the Milky Way (I had chosen to use a shorter exposure than absolutely required, in search of the sharpest stars I could get). However, f/2 meant half as much light as f/1.4. Funnily enough, after one shot at the same ISO 3200 I had used for the Milky Way, I dropped it to 1600, and liked the result better.

This is the result of a smidgen of processing of the from-camera jpg in Photogene4 on my iPad. I also tried one using Photogene to develop the RAW, but it was hella-noisy, no matter what I did. I tried using PiRAWnha, an iPad RAW developer, but again it was massively noisy. I've since opened the RAW file on my iMac in Light Zone, and it is not noisy, so I don't know what's going on there. So far, perhaps because I know how to use Photogene well, it has given me the best result - but I will revisit Light Zone and see what I can do with the RAW.

LARGE HUNTER. I do like that the Orion Nebula (Messier 42) is seen rather nicely - the second "star" in Orion's sword.

Had the day off today to be with mrs tsuken for her birthday. Some shopping was done, some lunching was done, a nice day was had. 8)