Messier M42 - NGC1976 - Orion Nebula & NGC1977 Running Man Nebula - AP modified 70D First Light - 1/1/2014 (Processed cropped stack)

I generally post based on the date of the evening I start imaging rather than the local time of the image. This one occurred after midnight, so I'm calling this 1/1/2014 and is my first night object with my new Astrophotography modified Canon 70D. See also uncropped version. The 'Great Orion Nebula', M42 or NGC 1976, is located in the sword of Orion and is one of the brightest nebula in the sky, and perhaps the best known. It is a young star formation region with very hot high-UV stars ionising and 'lighting' the nebula.The brightness of these young stars make this an astrophotography challenge as the central regions are very bright in comparison to the tenous outer nebula and over exposure becomes a problem. High Dynamic Range (HDR) techniques must be used to produce an image with a 'flattened' brightness range, more akin to the way the human eye perceives a wide range of brightness. HDR attempt - DeepSkyStacker 3.3.3b51 Stacked 80% of 14 Images ISO 800 @ 10 Sec, 36 DARK @ 120 Sec, 32 BIAS, 20 FLATS 17 Images ISO 800 @ 120 Sec, 36 DARK @ 120 Sec, 32 BIAS, 20 FLATS Post processed with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Hotech SCA Field Flattener, Hutech IDAS LPS-P2 filter, Canon 70D Baaded BCF modified DSLR field 106' x 159' , Ambient 17C. EQMOD EQASCOM with Ascom 6 for mount control. BackYardEOS 3.0.3 for Image acquisition. Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. Guidescope - Orion ShortTube 80 with Starlight Xpress SuperStar (Mono) CCD Auto Guider and Stark Labs PHD auto guiding software.