Sword of Orion: Reprocessed

They say that you can reprocess astro images until the cows come home. I am never fully satisfied with my images, and always revisit them to see what extra detail I can tweak out of them. I always feel that there is some extra data, or a different set of steps one can take to produce a better image.

Anyway, I combined my two three minute exposures with my best four one minute exposures from a month ago, and below is the resulting image. It's about ten minutes of data. The earlier exposures were plagued with light pollution, thus the reddish tinge in the dark sky area of the field of view. I found a way to reduce this by using the Selective Color tool in Photoshop, by just increasing the blackness of the image. It eats away at some of the nebulosity if you're not too careful! I still need to attempt this photo in dark, light-pollution free skies!

Click on the image for full size. You can see some nicer nebula detail in M42, and the Running Man is a little more apparent.