1-24-2015-M42- Again

The clouds rolled in last night and I managed a 10-minute session through high, light haze before I was clouded out. I took some very quick pix of M42, aiming for a more natural-looking image with more subtle detail, including the four stars of the Trapezium (center of the image), which usually overexpose in the longer integrations.  Above is the result. Image was taken with 14 inch ACF, Mallincam Jr Pro, MFR-5 Focal reducer and Orion Skyglow filter.

By contrast, here's a more processed view taken from the batch I took earlier in the week:

As you can see, there's more detail visible in the nebula itself, but at the expense of detail in the "blown out" core region. 

Sometimes, monochrome and image inversion can bring out subtle details that seem to be masked in the color images.  Below are the images above reprocessed in different ways to try to extract more detail:

I'm also going to try experimenting with the HDR stacking filter in the Milsoslick capture software. This function captures and blends images taken with different exposure times to produce a more even and vivid image.  All I need if for the weather to cooperate!