ISO 200 Shutter Speed 10s
There’s a surprising amount of detail in the image, even as a jpeg file.
Astrophotography was a passion of mine in a previous life. I still have all the gear, large refractor, large Schmidt Newtonian, sensitive CCD Astro camera, and a large robotic auto tracking mount, but unfortunately my deteriorating physic restricts me from humping it around.
Back to your photo. I boosted the levels a bit just using a crude editor on my iPad and there’s quite a lot of information to be dug out.
If you were to use a higher iso, and subtract a dark frame to reduce noise, preferably in RAW format I’m sure you’d easily pull out some of the nebulous it you around the Trapezium.
Another technique to try is stacking multiple images of at the same exposure. This increases the dynamic range allowing for some aggressive tweaking. There is an easy, and free, program called DeepSky Stacker. It uses the stars in the frames to auto align the images, and allows you to apply different filters.
Regards
Nidge.
I will have a look at that thanks. Where I live is dark and has little light pollution, however there us some pollution on the horizon. Here is one from the other night straight up and no light pollution.
That’s half the battle won there. Unfortunately my skies have all but disappeared. My neighbour has a tree that he refuses to cut, even had a preservation order placed on it, which blocks out everything to the North, so now I can’t polar align the mount. Added to this everyone now has security lights which the neighbourhood cats use for full effect.
Anywho, a quick tweak of your second pic and again lots of info to be had with the right tools, which I didn’t use
Nidge