Thank you for sharing your photos - this is exactly what this project is all about! :-)
It turns out the reducer can eat away detail. Here is a composite from two stacks with different filters and different focal lengths. The goal was to bring back the sharpness from the old image into the shot with the reducer. I must admit that I couldn't fully restore the sharpness. The SNR improved significantly in the center of the frame, leaving a noisy border, and I had to get creative with a mask to fix the bug. The colors mixed interestingly from the different filters; I wanted to adjust the color to be closer to the last version. Some Herbig-Haro objects were partially lost, which is unfortunate, but as a learning process, it turned out quite engaging. In short, it's possible, but not advisable. I think that's enough M42 for now. Sorry for the photo spam—I just posted a similar one recently. P.S. The shot with the reducer was also taken in terrible seeing for my location.
The effect is a little bit of everything: the reducer, the telescope, and the Moon filter in the first case, and the weather in the second. Probably that's it. Well, it's like the situation with a bad dancer.
Does the filter actually cut IR? I had one like that and it seemed to be for visual use. So it must pass IR. And on lens-based optics, that bloats the stars.)
14 Feb, 2026
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A reducer is always a compromise...
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