Already as a child, I was impressed by the region around Orion. My uncle, who held a degree in nature science, told me a lot about our universe, right out of the time he learned about it.  

Later I saw the first images from the great Orion Nebula and the Horsehead Nebula. I was back then dreaming about visiting these beauties once in a time. But guess what I found out this may take longer than I expected by then. Meanwhile, I took images from both and have a long story already posted here on M42.

Hence, as I often lack the time to take new data on my own nowadays I am glad that services like TelescopeLive exist. I saw a post in the forums on an Orion mosaic dataset and the version from Scotty Bishop which I liked a lot. But with all I felt in my heart I knew I needed to go with something more dramatic.

I downloaded the set and after I was done with preprocessing I was sure it needed to "burn" as Ha and SII in combination would just be impressive. OIII however was a nice addition, but not the most relevant in the first place. It was not the first time that I had some minor issues with Flats on datasets from TelescopeLive, might be just me but I ended up sometimes with circular areas, visible as not being corrected as they should. Having this in a Moasic gives you double trouble, but I still decided to go with it and worked through my usual steps. 

But after some stretching and working through some versions with Pixelmath I came up with a good basis and went on in Photoshop to iron out some more details in M42 and get the colors where I wanted them to be. This part for me is still a lot easier and intuitive in PS.

These were the three NB Images I worked with in PS:

Visible especially in SII, the already mentioned concentric rings which are also visible in each of the two images that concise the mosaic. 

Ultimately I am back to being a child when I look at the drama in Ha .

I am humbled that the image was chosen to be a TLPOD:


I hope you enjoy this region as much as I do.