The Orion Nebula (M42)

I’ve been fascinated by the Horsehead nebula in Orion ever since I found out about it as a boy. It’s a target I return to nearly every winter now. As my technique and equipment improves, it’s rewarding to see more and more detail.

This photo was processed in Siril and Gimp, and my camera at the time was a gnarly old CMOS chip with terrible chromatic noise problems. I tried many things over the years to mute that noise. Here I’ve tried using Gimp’s filters -> enhance -> symetric nearest neighbor to try to blur the noise out. This helps a little, but also literally blurs the image, as you can see.