Taken from my Canon EOS T2i, mounted to the top of my telescope. Thirty 10-second exposures. Manually subtracted the same dark frame from every one to account for the many dead pixels, then manually aligned and stacked in GIMP. No idea what I’m doing, but I like it good enough. Stacked with Siril. Should have done that from the start lol
Next time I’m gonna try to capture it high in the sky instead of when it’s at the horizon, and I’m gonna watch a tutorial on stacking instead of dicking around blindly
EDIT: I followed a tutorial! At least, as best as I could with one dark frame and no bias or flats. Still, a massive improvement over manual stacking. Still just dicked around with the colors and levels in GIMP after stacking, but you can sort of see M42 now!
Original picture for posterity. This is what the first 10 comments saw.
While there are star trackers (devices you mount your camera to to follow the movement of the stars) usually you have a steady camera and then align the images in post-processing with a program like Sequator, StarStax or Siril (other paid options also available).
I imagine that is possible with fast shutter speeds, but if you expose
3010 seconds with a big focal length (OP used a telescope)?It was on top of an equatorial mounted telescope. I do want to use the scope as a lens at some point but it needs a Barlow lens to focus, and that magnifies the image so much that any wind at all will ruin a picture