Celestron 4SE

🔭 - Seestar S50
⏳ - 7053x20 (39.18h)
⚙️ - Siril & AdobePhotoshop

• This is a 2-panel Mosaic showing off the Heart and Fish Head Nebula under Atlanta, Ga skies. One of my favorites for sure. Hope you enjoy & clear skies to all 💫

M45 — The Pleiades

This is my first time processing this Pleiades image outside the Seestar, using PixInsight and Photoshop to bring out the blue reflection nebulosity in the captured data.

Captured with my Seestar S50 from my backyard in Round Rock, Texas, on August 12, September 24, and September 28, 2025. IR-cut filter, gain 80.

This is a mosaic combining 685 exposures: 671 × 20 seconds and 14 × 30 seconds, for 3 hours, 50 minutes, and 40 seconds of total capture time. Exposure coverage varies across the mosaic, so each part of the image received a different amount of integration.

August 12: 7 minutes September 24: 2 hours, 27 minutes September 28: 1 hour, 16 minutes, 40 seconds

Processed with separate star and nebulosity stretches, background correction, color balance, and noise reduction.

Seestar S30 Pro, Bortle 6.7, 560 10/30/60 second subs, processed in Siril using Graxpert, RC-Astro and Veralux tools, GHS on the nebula and stars separately to avoid star bloat.

Taken from my bortle 9 balcony in Paris, this was didn't have such a strong gradient as I normally get here, so I enjoyed the processing a lot! I'd like to revisit this object with my wider FOV rig next year, I think it looks pretty cool

Equipment and acquisition:

- Askar 71F + 0.75X reducer

- Asi585MC Air

- Teseek 17

- SvBony + asi120mm guide camera

- ZWO EAF, ZWO EFW

- L-Ultimate filter: 216 x 180 sec

- Antlia ALP-T SII-OIII 3nm: 233 x 180 sec

(approx. 22.5 hours in total)

- 30 darks, 30 flats per filter, 30 bias

Processing (PI)

WBPP 2x drizzle, SetiAstro AutoDBE, SPCC, blurX correct only, starX

On starless images: DBXtract, linear fit to Ha, then channel combination. Extract L component. SetiAstro statistical stretch (soft), then manual curves transformations with different color and range masks, selective color correction script, noiseX. For luminance, stretch and masked curves to bring up details, noiseX. LRGB combination, dark structure enhance script.

For stars: setiastro NB to RGB star stretch, pixelmath to recombine with starless

The great Orion Nebula and Running Man Nebula! This majestic stellar nursery is about 1400 light-years away and is one of the brightest deep sky objects in the night sky!

A very nostalgic target for me. This was the first deep sky object I captured 10 months back when I was just getting started in this hobby. Visited this back again now that the orion constellation is back up again! 🙂

Telescope: Seestar S50
Data: 4.5 hours
Tools used: GraXpert, Siril, GIMP
Script mentions: DeepSNR, CosmicClarity Sharpen, VeraLux (Revela & Curves), HDR_multiscale
Bortle 8-9

I found this session while going through my stored astrophotography data. I captured it from my Round Rock backyard on October 31–November 1, 2025, but had never processed it. This is its first finished image.

The bright star near the center is Sadr, also known as Gamma Cygni—a supergiant marking the center of the Northern Cross in Cygnus. It appears surrounded by the clouds of IC 1318, but that’s a line-of-sight effect: Sadr is roughly 1,800 light-years away, while the nebula lies much farther behind it, around 4,900 light-years away.

The red nebulosity is glowing hydrogen gas. The dark lanes cutting through it are clouds of dust blocking light from behind. This field captures part of the extensive gas-and-dust complex around Sadr.

The finished image combines 40 five-minute exposures—3 hours and 20 minutes—with my ASI585MC Air. Processing brought out the faint nebulosity and dust structure while controlling the stars and the glow around Sadr. A session sitting on a drive finally became an image.

Acquisition: ASI585MC Air, 40 × 300 seconds retained from 47 frames; gain 107, offset 15, recorded sensor temperatures −19.1 to −16.3°C. The headers record an AM3 mount and approximately 384 mm focal length; the telescope model is unconfirmed. Filter information was not recorded, and I no longer remember which filter was used.

Processing: bias and 100 same-night flats, conservative hot-pixel correction, registration and weighted integration in PixInsight. Compared 29-frame and 40-frame stacks and selected 40 for lower noise. Empirical field-star color balance, conservative BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator separation, masked NoiseXTerminator, then scripted stretches, local contrast, selective color and localized halo control. Stars were blended back separately. No synthetic nebulosity was added.

I was a 13 year old boy watching this live back then, past midnight, and it was incredibly exciting. This was on BBC1, their main channel, and looking at this through 2026 eyes, this is incredibly hard science.

You would not get coverage like this today. And look at the tech they were using! BBC Model B computers with a mighty 32K of RAM being used in one case. Fred Whipple and Jan Oort being interviewed too.

This is probably still the greatest achievement of European space flight.

https://youtu.be/QxDMdH4uzxI?si=V8ptDWoRkKrKHpk7

Target: IC 1848, the Soul Nebula

Location: Bortle 6, South Carolina

Gear:
Askar 103APO (700mm f/6.8)
ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
ZWO AM3N on iOptron LiteRoc tripod
ZWO ASIAir
Antlia 3nm Ha, OIII, SII and Antlia V-Pro RGB

Integration (about 22h 23m):
Ha: 44 × 500s (6h 07m)
OIII: 59 × 500s (8h 12m)
SII: 51 × 500s (7h 05m)
RGB (stars): 20 × 60s each
Calibration: darks, flats, bias

This is my first time processing this M95 data, captured from my backyard in Round Rock, Texas, on March 12–13, 2026.

M95 is a barred spiral galaxy about 33 million light-years away in Leo. Its central bar and tightly wound spiral arms give it that distinctive ringlike appearance.

The finished image combines 56 two-minute exposures—1 hour and 52 minutes—captured with my ASI2600MC Air and no added filter.

Processing included calibration and stacking in PixInsight, photometric color calibration, and separate treatment of the galaxy and stars. The final adjustments bring out the bar and surrounding ring while keeping the bright center controlled. A tighter crop gives M95 more presence in the frame.

Acquisition and processing details: ASI2600MC Air, 56 × 120 seconds, gain 200, offset 50, approximately −10°C, no added filter. Headers record an AM3 mount and 387 mm focal length; the telescope model is unconfirmed. Calibrated with a matching 28-frame 120-second dark master and a candidate flat; flat calibration is approximate because its bias pedestal was assumed. PixInsight VNG debayering, registration, PSF-weighted integration with Winsorized sigma rejection. Compared all 56 on-target frames with the sharpest 40 and retained 56. ABE background correction, plate solving and Gaia DR3 SPCC color calibration, mild BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, and masked NoiseXTerminator. Luminance-preserving stretch, separate star recombination, masked galaxy contrast and sharpening with core protection, and a native-resolution crop. No generative image processing.

Believe it or not, the image in the eyepiece was even better than the video!

12" DOB + Astral Fields EQ Platform

SVBony 705C + ADC + Barlow 2x

Firecapture + PiPP+ Autostakkert + Registax + Fast Stone Image Viewer

I have finally managed to get better settings for moon photography and managed to capture these beautiful pictures of Luna!

I am using a Sony Cyber-Shot Dsc-Hx300 that my dad gifted me years ago :)

Any tips and comments regarding the pictures are welcome :)

Images taken with iPhone 17

I have recently purchased and received my Dwarf3. It has been raining for the past week and I took the chance on the clear skies to capture the moon as the first test and C 63 Helix Nebula. I am extremely happy how these both turned out after editing in Lightroom. I will be focusing more on deep space with the dwarf3 as my Mirrorless full frame camera and telescope can capture the moon and Milky Way at a better resolution.

See also: The publication in ArXiV

This is IC 1795, or otherwise known as the Fish Head Nebula.

Equipment:

Sky-Watcher Quattro 200p

Explore Scientific Exos2 GT (Average guiding RMS 0.5 arc seconds

Canon T2i (I full spectrum modified)

GSO 2 Inch Coma Corrector

ASIAIR Mini

Asi120mm Mini

8x50 Guidescope

Svbony Sv240

__________________________________________________

8 Hours 30 Minutes total exposure time, 40 minutes in broadband for stars, and 7 hours 50 minutes in narrowband. Taken over 2 nights with a near full moon. Five minute exposures for narrowband, and thirty second exposures for the stars.

You can submit your questions now: https://www.reddit.com/u/UCBerkeley/s/we4fFYuTje

The deep cobalt in most popular images comes from contrast-stretching and color balancing meant to bring out cloud features. When researchers reprocessed the Voyager 2 data in 2024, they found Neptune is closer to a muted greenish-blue, much like Uranus, and only slightly bluer.

This is my attempt at what you’d actually see. It's a view from the upper atmosphere of neptune above its cloud tops, as if you teleported there and taken a photo with a phone. Sunlight there is about 1/900th as strong as on Earth, so the scene is dim, like dusk or heavy overcast day on Earth. Theres also a couple stars and Triton just above the horizon.

How I made it: The base was rendered in SpaceEngine. AI was used for the cloud texture, haze, realism, the moon, etc. I did the color grading and final adjustments in Photopea.

Analysis:

This image is consistent with what Neptune probably looks like, though nobody has seen it from this vantage, so it’s a plausible reconstruction and not a verified one. The clouds are long, thin horizontal streaks, as expected for a planet whose winds reach about 2000 km/h and stretch features along lines of latitude. The thick raised ribbons are meant to be high methane-ice cirrus. Voyager 2 showed long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in the atmosphere, and NASA puts their heights at of the order of 50 kilometers above a deeper cloud deck, with streak widths of 50 to 200 kilometers. The lit left sides, the soft bluish shadows falling to the right, and the haze softening everything toward the horizon follow NASA’s description, in which the deck is deep enough that scattering by the overlying molecules diffuses light into the shadows, which look blue. The smooth haze-to-black gradient at the limb matches how any thin atmosphere looks edge-on, and the haze reaching above the cloud tops fits models in which a thin aerosol haze reaches high into the stratosphere. The color is a muted azure-blue rather than a deep ultramarine, which is deliberate, because Neptune’s true color is a greenish blue, and the saturated deep blue of the Voyager pictures came from enhancement. The lighting is dim because as I said, sunlight at Neptune is only about 1/900 as strong as at Earth. It also comes from one consistent direction which is shown by Triton’s lit left side, the faint cool brightening along the left horizon, and the cloud highlights and shadows. Triton is the brightest object in the frame, with a pale cream-pink tint and a smooth surface. That fits a moon with a surface reflectance of roughly 0.7 to 1, slightly pink nitrogen frost, and very few impact craters. At about 0.45° across, which is my estimate from its orbit, it’s roughly the Moon’s apparent size from Earth. The two stars are compact and dimmer than Triton, as they should be for an exposure set for a lit haze band.

Image 1 is meant to replicate a phone photo as if you teleported there and took a picture. It uses convincing lifted blue-tinted blacks, smooth blotchy noise left by noise reduction in the dark sky instead of film grain, restrained sharpening with slight local-contrast halos, held highlights, small glowing star points, a slight handheld tilt, and JPEG compression. It has no vignette or color fringing, because phone processing corrects both.

According to the catalog: "Copernicus’ presentation of heliocentrism radically altered our understanding of Earth’s place within the solar system and universe. Contemporary space exploration would be utterly impossible, let alone inconceivable, without such groundbreaking revelations as set out by Copernicus. Heliocentrism remains a guiding doctrine of all astronomical understanding, marking this book as one of the most revolutionary scientific texts in history."

Link to detailed description, photos and an essay placing this this work in the history of science at https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2026/reason-and-revolution-extraordinary-works-from-a-distinguished-private-collection-part-1/copernicus-nicolaus-de-revolutionibus-orbium?locale=en

Disclaimer: OP is not affiliated with Sotheby or any other auction firm. This post is strictly for informational and educational purposes.

I have been doing a bit of work imaging IC 1396 recently. It has been difficult due to the weather but this is from the past month, over multiple nights.

Equipment:
Astromodified Canon 700d
Skywatcher 72 ED DS Pro
Skywatcher AZ GTI in EQ Mode
Optolong L-Enhance Filter
ASI Air Mini
ZWO 120mm Guide Cam with 30mm Guide Scope

175 x 180 sec exposures taken over multiple nights with 20 darks taken each night to match.

20 Flats
20 Bias

Each night stacked separately then combined using APP.

I started with a pretty heavy crop to isolate the trunk section.

BGE, deconvolution and de-noise in Graxpert.

Siril for SPCC.

Star removal using StarNet through Siril.

GHS using human weighted luminance.

Curves adjustment using VeraLux Curves.

HDR Multiscale.

SCNR in Siril

Recombination of stars.

Slight saturation increase.

Thanks for looking!

Another look at the Monkey Head Nebula, NGC 2174. I’ve posted this target before, but this version revisits the original exposures with updated processing to bring out the dark lanes and give the nebula more separation from the surrounding stars.

I captured this from my backyard in Round Rock on November 8, 2025, using my ZWO ASI585MC Air. The finished image combines 45 five-minute exposures—3 hours and 45 minutes of total integration.

For this reprocessing, I compared several stacks and kept all 45 exposures. I worked on the nebula and stars separately, refined the background, and applied restrained sharpening to make the smaller structures easier to see. A slightly wider crop gives the faint outer cloud more room.

Acquisition and processing details: ASI585MC Air, gain 107, offset 15, 45 × 300 seconds. The headers identify a ZWO AM3 mount and 383 mm focal length; I have not confirmed the telescope model. The filter was not recorded and I do not remember which was fitted. Recorded sensor temperature was approximately −15.2 to −16.5°C.

Bias calibration and 99 same-night flats, targeted bad-pixel correction, PixInsight VNG debayering and registration, PSF-weighted integration with Winsorized sigma rejection. Compared 36-, 42-, and 45-frame stacks and retained all 45. Background modeling and empirical field-star color balance, mild BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, followed by masked luminance contrast/sharpening, a small ridge lift, and reduced star brightness. Final RGB presentation; no generative image processing.

Not every plan goes to plan. Sometimes technology goes haywire and I wake up to find my telescope pointing at the ground with wires snagged. Sometimes the meridian flip doesn’t work and I gather no data. Focuser doesn’t work, guiding flies off the handle. So many variables. In this instance it didn’t centre on the target. This was my second imaging session of the night. Still gathered something worth processing. 2.5hrs on the Rosette Nebula from my rooftop in Toronto under bortle 8 skies. Next time will hopefully be better. Still happy with the results though. Clear skies everyone.

30x300s lights
Calibration frames
Gain 100
Cooled to -5

Gear: Svbony 122mm apo, zwo 2600mc pro, ragdoll 17 pro, Optolong L-Ultimate, zwo guide cam & scope, zwo Asiair, zwo eaf.

Stacked in Astro Pixel Processor. Processed in Pixinsight. DBE, D Crop, blur x, noise x, stat stretch, star x, narrowband norm, range mask, curves transformation. Further editing in photoshop.