M45 – The Pleiades

Last year, I travelled not far from Toronto to a Provincial Park called Forks of the Credit. It was very windy, and my guiding was horrible. In the end, I managed to only image 10 subs of M45. At the time, I did not dither, and was not using any flat frames.
This year I decided to take it up a notch, and travel further north, to a Bortle 3 area. This time armed with a D5300 (less noise), and better calibration frame techniques, I snapped up 35 subs of Pleiades. I also had my friend’s company, who came along for the 2 hour ride.

The results speak for them selves. The two photos below are the results of each session’s stack. The images are not processed for this demonstration, only the light pollution gradient is removed using ABE in Pixinsight. Notice how much more nebulosity and SNR the right image has. Although I am not too happy with the star bloat on the D5300. I think it is caused by the Ha modification, which doesn’t cut off the red spectrum as much. A reflection nebula such as this might benefit from using an IR filter in the future.

After some tedious Pixinsight processing, we arrive at the final image below:

Last Updated on March 18, 2021