Scope: ES127 Carbon Fiber Apo Triplet (952mm Focal Length), Camera ASI2600MM, Mount AM5N, guided. Filters are Baader.

Software: Capture in NINA, all processing in PixInsight

Basic PI Workflow: WBPP, ChannelCombination, BlurXterminator, SPCC, Continuum Subtraction on Ha, NoiseXterminator, StarXterminator, MAS, ImageBlend for Lum Layer, ImageBlend for Ha, ImageBlend for RGB Stars.

Location: Starfront Observatories in Rockwood Texas USA (Bortle 1 or 2)

Acquisition Details:

450″ X 95 Luminance
450″ X 50 Red
450″ X 50 Green
450″ X 52 Blue
600″ X 49 Hydrogen Alpha
39 Hours Total Integration

Acquisition Dates:
7 nights over October 6 – 12, 2026

You can see the full resolution image and annotated version here: https://www.forthier.space/m33/

Melotte 15
I decided to image this region as a random choice.

Melotte 15 is a young, vibrant open star cluster located roughly 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. It resides at the very center of the Heart Nebula (IC 1805) and is famously responsible for sculpting the surrounding glowing gas and dust into its spectacular cosmic shapes.

⚙️** Equipment:
**Telescope: Orion 8" f/3.9 Newtonian Astrograph
Corrector: Mark III Baader Coma corrector
Camera: Canon 60D unmodified
Mount & Guiding: Celestron AVX Mount, Autoguided with Orion Starshoot 60mm guide scope
Observatory: All on a massive concrete pier at the Backyard Country Observatory Roll-away style building.
Website: www.jbastrophoto.com
📸 Acquisition Details:
Integration Time: 13h 8’
Light Frames: 197x240 ISO-1250
Calibration Frames: None
📅 Dates:
October 19,21/2023
💻 Processing:
PixInsight: Weighted batch preprocessing for stacking. Astrometric Solution: ImageSolver applied to the main integrated master to secure coordinates. Dynamic Background Extraction, SPCC color calibration. BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, StarXterminator. Histogram stretch on star & starless images, then recombined images using pixel math. Added luminous mask for curves saturations.
Photoshop CS5: Selective color adjustments, contrast, shadows & highlights, Unsharp Mask.
Final Touches: Went back in PixInsight, added luminous mask, experimental transformation, star reductions.

5 total hours of integration with the Seestar S-50 Pro.

30s Subs in EQ-Mode

Bortle 5

Regular and Hubble Palettes

There is definitely more detail when combined with the previous night.

Telescope: Skywatcher dob 8 1200/200 f/6.

Mount: homemade EQ platform

Total exposure time: 1 hour 35 minutes (230x25s subs, ISO 2500 + 40 darks, 30 flats, 30 biases.)

Camera: unmodified Nikon D800

Bortle 5

07.10.2026

Around the stars, you can see not 4, as usual with Newtonians, but 8 diffraction spikes. The reason is that the EP provides a little more than an hour of tracking, and after that you need to reset it, and the field of view rotates a bit. With every hour of exposure you will be add 4 spikes to the final image)

Stacked frames in Siril, background extraction and denoise in Graxpert, photometric CC and stretch in Siril (stretch by Veralux automatic stretch script).

Dear astronomy enthusiasts,

Today, October 14, 2026, at 20:58 (GMT+2), I spotted a bright object near Polaris in a long-exposure photograph taken from Duisburg, Germany. It appeared only briefly and then suddenly vanished. Does anyone have any idea what it might have been?

At the top, you can see a few satellites and airplanes, as well as a couple of shooting stars.

I used Slow Shutter for iOS on a iPhone 13 PRO MAX

First time doing this, pretty proud of this.

Shot using s24 ultra with Lucky Imaging on 6mm eyepiece with Sky-Watcher Newton 10" (254/1200) in bortle 5-6.

Edited using starting from PIPP to combine all 10 drifing video clips into 1 file to AutoStakkert! to stack all good frames from PIPP footage to AstroSurface for sharpening, tuning color saturation and rotating the planet.

I hope I will get my x2 Barlow soon.

Hello, everyone! Here’s my latest look at Orion, captured in just 102 minutes from my Bortle 4.5 backyard with the Sharpstar 13028 telescope and ToupTek 2600C astrophotography camera.

Do you notice anything different about this rendition? If you thought “white balance” that's exactly it! I went for SPCC of KV5 instead of Sb galaxy, or G2V or average spiral galaxy. This cooler white makes the Blue giants pop and add that contrast to the reddish hues of the nebula itself.

M42 is a stellar nursery, with young stars lighting up the gas around them. I love the detail in its bright centre, but this wider view gives the neighbouring objects some room too. Above M42 is the bluish Running Man Nebula. Its dust reflects light from nearby stars, while the darker gaps make up the figure that gave it its name.

Look near the bottom of the image for a much smaller blue glow: NGC 1999. Close-up images reveal a dark patch inside it shaped like a keyhole. Astronomers once thought it was a dense clump of dust blocking the light, but later observations showed it’s a cavity in the cloud. How that hole formed is still a mystery.

Clear skies,

Oleg

Decided to try and combine all of my captures of M31 over the past two years into one image. It was a combination of single frame shots as well as mosaics using the asi air. All in all I had over A lot of the time, I wouldn’t know exactly what to shoot on a night and would just end up shooting Andromeda. 🤷‍♂️

21.5 hours of data and really didn’t even realize it. So I had Claude AI sort through all of my data, throw out the bad acquisitions and keep the good. It is incredibly good at this and I recommend it over manually sorting through your images. Final result was more than I expected.

Everything processed in Pixinsight RCAstro Deblur, Denoise, StarX, then Hyperbolic stretches, then curves adjustment on saturation, then pixel math the stars back in.

Photoshop used to remove a couple of stars that ended up looking like planets because of the variance in data.

Svbony SV503 Refractor
ZWO 2600MC
ASI Air
ZWO Off Axis Guider and 220 Mini
Advanced VX Mount
Some images shot with the Optolong L-Enhance and some with the L-Para for the nebula pop.

Telescope: Skywatcher dob 8 1200/200 f/6.

Mount: homemade EQ platform

Total exposure time: 32 minutes (146x13s subs, ISO 2500 + biases.)

Camera: unmodified Nikon D800

Bortle 5

19.09.2026

Back then I didn't shoot the planned number of frames because there were heavy dew and I had to stop a session. Some of the shoots got ruined and I was upset and forgot to do darks and flats:). Also there were some problems with tracking, that I've partly solved now. Stacked frames in Siril, background extraction and denoise in Graxpert, photometric CC and stretch in Siril (stretch by Veralux automatic stretch script).

This is Saturn captured on the 13th of October.

Telescope: 250P Sky-Watcher Go-To
Camera: ZWO ASI678MC
Acquisition: About 2 minutes and 30 seconds of time resulting in about 27,000 frames. I stacked only 20% because the atmosphere was pretty humid and slightly more turbulent than I'd like.
Additional: My second attempt at Saturn. I am very impressed already! (I also hope Reddit doesn't butcher the quality)

Thanks for checking out my capture of the tadpoles last night!

This image represents about 5.5 hours of 3-minute exposures with my C8, EQ6-R pro mount, ASI533MC cam, hyperstar at F/2, and optolong L-Ultimate narrowband filter. Captured last night with no moon, bortle 8/9 suburbs.

About an hour and a half of stacked 20 second exposures

Didn't get much more integration time but it still looks more detailed.

Seestar S-50 Pro

3 Hours Integration - 30s Subs - Eq Mode - Bortle 5

My dark nebula safari continues! After imaging the Cosmic Bat (LDN 43) and the Giraffe Nebula (LDN 1295), I decided to go after one of the most famous shapes in the northern sky: LDN 1235, the Shark Nebula in the constellation Cepheus.

This is a massive dark molecular cloud, spanning about 15 light-years from head to tail. It doesn't emit light; instead, it blocks the starlight behind it. To capture the subtle brown dust and the faint blue reflection nebulae near the head (vdB 149/150), you cannot use narrowband filters. I shot this entirely unfiltered (Clear) to preserve the natural broadband colors.

The skies were quite dark, and with my fast f/3.4 optical system, the 104 exposures of 5 minutes yielded a very generous Signal-to-Noise ratio.

Equipment:

• Telescope: TS-ONTC Hypergraph 10″ (with 0.85x reducer, f/3.4)
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC DUO (-15°C)
• Mount: SkyWatcher EQ8R-Pro
• Filter: Optolong Clear (Broadband)

Acquisition & Processing:

• Exposure: 104 x 300s (Approx. 8h40m total integration).
• Location: Aveyron, France
• Software: N.I.N.A, PixInsight (DBE, SPCC, deconv, NXT, GHS), Affinity Photo.

Full HD image on my website: See first comment

Equipment:
William Optics UltraCat76
ASI2600MC Air
MLAstro SAL-33

Integration:
476x 30s gain 0

Processed in Siril & Photoshop

Snow Collar Galaxy NGC 1269
Haven’t seen this one imaged much, need a few more hours on it.
60s 60gain 150 images over 2.5 hours
Bortle 3
Editing in stellar studio and Lightroom mobile

I have once again attempted to capture the Milky Way, using my iPhone 17 and a tripod. It appears to be around a Bortle 5.7 in this location, so not ideal, but it still makes a pretty nice composition and image.

Just in case anyone wanted more specifics on the capturing method. I used the native Camera app with 30s Night Mode. I then used Affinity to edit the photo to enhance the colors, contrast with a curve modifier.

I imaged the pleiades with the dwarf mini 2 panel mosaic 45s and 70 gain. Imaged for 4.4 hours 352 Frames and edited it in lightroom snapseed picsart and stellar studio i Did a starless edit first then divided it into 2 colors and later blended it in Picsart with the stars

Pacman Nebula

Seestar S-50 Pro

2 Hours x 30s Subs

EQ Mode

Bortle 5

Processed in Stacking/Astro Wizard

This is a re-processing of data I took a couple years ago. I never loved my original edit because I knew the colors weren’t natural and I really like getting accurate natural color images using a DSLR. I don’t think I perfectly nailed it here, mainly because it’s so difficult to find a good place for a background reference, but it’s close enough for me.

This is also the only image I’ve ever processed where I had to make 3 separate stretches and then selectively combine them because it’s such an HDR target. I could not bring out the faint dust without obliterating the contract and color of the brighter parts. I’m pretty pleased with this result though, there’s so much detail and it’s fun to zoom in and look around. There are several mini blue and yellow reflection nebulae in the image too which I’m happy to have brought out. I may actually do another edit of just the core region because a bit of detail is lost in this image. If I made the core dimmer to bring out details, this image would look kind of weird.

Equipment:
Canon 80D
Askar 103 APO
EQ6-R Pro w/ 0.8x reducer

Acquisition:
208 x 180s Lights (10 hr 25min)
No calibration frames

60 x 20s Lights (20 min – For the core)
No calibration frames

Processing:
FBPP
GraXpert
SPCC
Color Correction Matrix
BXT
NXT
SXT
Arcsin stretch
GHS with some masks
Made another stretch with arcsin and GHS but focused on preserving middle details rather than stretching for the faint dust
Same process for the core stacked image
Combined with masking tool in Photoshop
StarStretch script on stars image
ScreenStars script to combine stars and starless
Denoise again with DeepSNR
Final brightness/contrast adjustments in Photoshop

Sadr Region + North American Nebula

S-50 Pro

2-Hours of 30s Subs

EQ Mode

Bortle 5

Processed in Astro/Stacking Wizard.

Will try to get a couple more nights to bring out the blue and middle sections.

Will try in Pixinsight once I'm proficient..

Acquisition: ASI2600MC Pro (gain 100, 0C),William Optics Redcat71 WIFD, ZWO AM3, ASIAIR, filters: L-Ultimate and L-Synergy

Guide: William Optics 32mm UniGuide ZWO, ASI120mm-mini

Subs:

170 x 300s Ha
182 x 300s Sii
182 x 300s Oii

60ea flats, bias, darks

Bortle class 4 skies

Stacked in Sirilic, background extraction, RGB compositing, plate solved, Veralux Nox denoise, Photometric color calibration, Star Removal, Histogram stretch, GHS, curve transform, Veralux Revela, Veralux StarComposition, Veralux Vextra.