Acquisition details
Target: Sh2-157 (Lobster Claw Nebula), Cassiopeia
Location: Fort Mill, SC, USA (Bortle 6)
Dates: October 2026, 4 nights

Equipment
Telescope: Askar 103APO (700mm, f/6.8)
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
Mount: ZWO AM3N
Filters: Antlia 3nm Ha / OIII / SII, Antlia V-Pro R / G / B
Filter wheel: ZWO EFW
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Guiding: SVBony guide scope + ZWO ASI220MM Mini
Control: ZWO ASIair Plus

Integration
Ha: 45 × 500s (6.3 h)
OIII: 53 × 500s (7.4 h)
SII: 60 × 500s (8.3 h)
RGB (stars): 15 × 120s each (1.5 h)
Total: 23.4 hours
Gain 100, cooled to -10°C
Calibration: 500s: 25, 120s: 25** darks,** Ha: 50, OIII: 50, SII: 50, R: 50, G: 50 B: 50 flats, 50 bias

Processing (PixInsight 1.9.5)
WBPP (PSF Signal Weight, Local Normalization, cosmetic correction)
GradientCorrection, BlurXTerminator
GHS stretch with highlight protection on the bright core
StarXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator
NarrowbandNormalization (SHO palette)
Curves, masked core dimming, DarkStructureEnhance, LocalHistogramEqualization, SCNR
RGB stars: SPCC, BlurXTerminator, GHS, StarXTerminator, black-point clip, screen-blended back in

I originally took this image in December of 2024 in Canyonlands National Park. I spent the night on top of a rock formation with just a camera and a tripod taking lots of short exposures. I recently re-processed it using a trial version of Pixinsight and RC Astro tools. I am sold on PI (and RC Astro). The difference between my original images (mostly processed in Siril) is night and day.

Camera - Unmodified Canon T7

Lens - 135mm Rokinon f2.0

600x1.6 seconds (16 minutes integration)

Regular tripod with intravalometer

Siril OSC Pre-Processing

Pixinsight, BlurX, NoiseX, StarX. I used Phillipe Bernhard's workflow for simple OSC processing in Pixinsight

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/

Wanted to practice dual duo-band image processing for when my Draco arrives.

I used the inbuilt ha/oiii narrowband filter in the dwarf 3 , along with a askar colour magic sii/oiii filter in an external holder to take this image of the lagoon nebula (m8).

Details:

Ha/Oiii - 415 minutes integration time

Sii/Oiii - 520 minutes integration time

Each was stacked in Pixinsight before splitting into red green and blue channels.

Blue and green from each stack were combined into Oiii signal, which was then averaged from each stack into a master Oiii. Ha came from the red channel of the first stack and Sii from the red channel of the second stack.

These were then individually processed with graxpert, blurx, noiseX and starX before stretching using mutli-scale adaptive stretching.

Background between the three channels was kept constant and each channel was stretched to be as close in nebula brightness as possible before recombining into the Foraxx palette.

Saturation and colour masking was then used to adjust colours to get to the desired look before stars were added back in.

Overall, I had a lot of fun having a second narrowband dataset to work with and im looking forward to the Draco being able to do it natively.

First time trying to shoot the veil nebula. Expected a little more out of it just because of my long exposure time, but regardless it came out somewhat good, especially for my sub-par imaging conditions.

Total around 20 hours of total exposure, shot over 5 nights, 45" subs (no guiding, as you can tell from the walking noise)

30 flats, darks, and biases. Although flats didn't work for some reason, probably because night 1 and night 2 weren't centered.

STOCK canon t3i, 75-300mm kit lens shot at 135mm (cropped) f/4.5, bortle 7ish skies, with a star adventurer gti.

Processing used - Siril, GraXpert, photoshop, noiseXterminator

Hope you guys enjoy and open for suggestions!

Decided to give another shot at editing my M31 capture, since I didn't know about gaxpert and starnet when i first took it. This is about 1700x1.3sec lights for about 40mins of total integration, 30 darks and biases, 50 flats. Camera is an eos 6d using a 200mm tamron adaptal 2

My automated solar rig was recording at about 59 fps when an airliner crossed the full disk in about 0.6 seconds. I didn't know it had happened until my transit detector flagged it afterwards.

This is a reprocessed image showing the turbulence which the lucky imaging algorithm had removed previously.

The plane: Delta flight 2078 (N312DN, an Airbus A321), five minutes into its trip from SFO to Minneapolis. It was climbing through about 10,700 ft, roughly 4.6 km from me, at 311 knots. I identified it by working out its distance from its size against the Sun (the Sun's diameter gives the scale), then matching that against public ADS-B history (adsb.lol). Only one aircraft was in that spot at that moment.

The turbulence: look behind the engines. The hot exhaust bends the light and makes the granulation ripple and swirl, and the wake hangs over the disk for about a second after the plane has gone.

How it's made

The background Sun is a lucky-imaging stack from the same capture run, with my usual colourised processing.

The plane is the real silhouette from each raw frame. Off the disk the raw is just black sky, so I rebuilt the full outline from the frames where it was on the disk and carried it along its straight-line path. That's how it passes over the limb and the prominences.

The exhaust distortion is measured, not added for effect. I compared each raw frame with clean frames from before and after the pass to see how far the light was bent. Normal seeing moves things about 1 px; the wake moves them 3–10+ px. I applied that bending only where it's clearly above seeing.

Gear
Lunt LS60THa
ZWO ASI585MM
Losmandy G11 (shared with my night-time deep-sky rig)
0.71 ms exposures, about 59 fps, 1696×1696 crop

When and where: 11 Oct 2026, 12:36 PT, Walnut Creek, California.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

Telescope: CELESTRON INSPIRE 80 Refractor Telescope

Phone Camera: Samsung 21 Ultra

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

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).

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

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.

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.

Exposure

24 x 30s R
22 x 30s G
21 x 30s B
170 x 240s Hα
214 x 240s OIII
43 x 240s SII

... totaling 28 1/2 hours of narrowband data. Deeper LRGB imaging would be possible, but such exposures tend to reveal rather foreground dust structures that, for my taste, don't add to but rather distract from the delicate nebulosity structures.

Equipment

Askar SQA106
Touptek 2600M
Astronomik L2 & Deep-Sky RGB & 6nm Hα / OIII / SII
Sky-Watcher Wave 150i
RBFocus Gaius-S2, eXcalibur, Merlin HD 3.0, Camelot S 2"
GL.iNet Comet Pro Remote KVM
DIY Observatory
N.I.N.A. / PixInsight / RC-Astro Tools / GraXpert / Photoshop

Date & Location

October 2–13; OIII exposures captured around the new moon; remote observatory south of Vienna/Austria, Bortle 4–5

Processing

PixInsight: WBPP with flats and biases, 2x Drizzle, and auto-crop. Narrowband filters were processed separately, while RGB data was combined and treated as follows: GraXpert, BlurXT, SPCC, and SCNR (applied to RGB stars), NoiseXT, and StarXT. Further blending and mixing were performed in Photoshop (utilizing, in particular, Smart Layers and Camera Raw).

About an hour and a half of stacked 20 second exposures

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