M42 - The Great Orion Nebula:

This image of M42, The Great Orion Nebula, also shows the smaller M43 nebula to the upper left of M42.  This image begs to be post processed.  I had collected many images and was post processing some them several days later, just cherry picking some of the raw images, the rest have not been touched.  I was working on the process, but taking advantage of the final good viewing days of spring, before the wild fires and then the humidity.  I'm positive the above is an On the Fly Drizzle.  I expect post processing of this image will provide quite impressive results.

This night it was really becoming apparent, as well as the night before, that I could, with some refinement on the process, get some really good results.  This was exciting.  It was also another reason why I focused on two separate paths at the same time.  Take images of interesting objects and save them for a later time when post processing could be performed efficiently.  I figured that raw images could be post processed later using techniques I didn't understand or even know I needed.  The second path was to work on the process of post processing images.  However, that was also stopped, as I felt it was important to review my work and publish it.  As I didn't want to loose anything I had learned.  And this information was surely good for anyone else starting out.

M42 enhanced CYMG raw image colorized to show intensity gradients:

This image is interesting for what it is, but also, what can be done with some post processing may be quite amazing.  This is a CYMG raw image, which causes the granularity.  It needs to be converted to luminosity and then drizzled.  I believe I have a couple hundred images of M42 just waiting to be post processed. 

Above is a colorized intensity image of a raw CYMG image of M42.  Note the granularity is very distinct in this image, as I set the histogram to best display the CYMG effect.  This image was not flipped.

A close up with a full range of intensities shown.  Note the effect of the CYMG color matrix.  You can see the MGMG verses the GMGM rows, while the CYCY rows do not reverse.

When an image is converted from CYMG to Luminosity, and then the intensities are mapped with color, a more uniform version of the image appears.   This image shown corresponds to the image just above, but zoomed in on the right side middle of the corresponding luminosity image.

The above image is the Green component of the same M42 image, colorized to show the CYMG pattern is not compensated for well by the Meade software.  The Red and Blue components have similar "issues".

Reference Image of M42:

Moon:

I couldn't get the granularity to go away (dah).  The above was a drizzle of CYMG raw images.

M81:

Above is an on the fly drizzle of M81 Galaxy.

The above is an enhanced image of one of the CYMG raw images captured.  It clearly shows the presence of the spiral arms of M81.  The exposure time was significant, as the star field is streaked.  The black circle in the middle has to do with my playing with Photoshop's histogram function, which is much nicer than Meade's Image Processing.  However, this was before I found the FITS Liberator, so I had to convert the image to a BMP or JPG, which reduces the data range making histogram processing almost useless. 

The above image is a raw image of M81 with a shorter exposure to remove the star field streaking.  It barely shows the minimal amount of light collected from the spirals, but they are visible even in the individual exposures.  Top to center of left is the data drivers heat generated by the CCD chip.  The colorization is inverted (black is brightest).  The spectrum used contains 16 "bands" of spectrums to show the minor fluctuations at all levels of intensity.

M81 Reference Image:

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