Tonight, if the clouds allow me, I wanted to take pictures with my Skywatcher Star Adventurer mini. As I'm going to set up a small telescope (a Celestron C90) I need a very good alignment to the Polar so that I don't have any traces left. Tips to make an alignment as accurate as possible? Thank you

This is 1158 * 0.8" exposures along with 50 dark and 50 flat frames stacked with Siril. Shot with my Sony A7Cii and a Hasselblad 350mm f/5.6.

My first photo with a telescope. It is not a incredible shoot but I am very proud of it.

Telescope: Celestron C90 Camera: Sony A7R Mk II (APS-C crop mode) Exposition: 1/10"

My first try at IC 1805 with my stock Fuji XT camera. Turned out way nicer than I could’ve imagined.

equipment:

• Samyang 135mm f2.0
• Fuji X-T5 (unmodified)
• STC duo-narrowband clip-in filter
• Star adventurer 2i

frames:

• 550x 60s
• ISO 1600
• f2.8

editing:

• stacked in Siril
• background removal with GraXpert
• editing in Photoshop

More infos on Telescopius: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/178053/deep_sky/heart-nebula/IC/1805/diffuse-nebula/by-maxi_franzi

If anyone knows what causes the elongated star shape in the top left corner please let me know. I tried to get the focus as perfect as possible.

I love seeing the astro images posted here, but may I share an algorithm for making them even more beautiful?

Most astro images are created from separate red, green and blue images taken with electronic detectors (whether using classic BVR filters in an attempt to replicate what the eye might see, or some other combination in a "false color" image). There are two big problems that are common with the images created in this way (even by professionals).

The first is in the choice of stretch: how brightness on the detector maps to brightness on the displayed image. Most choose a linear or a logarithmic stretch. A linear stretch brings out fine detail at the faint end, but can leave the viewer ignorant of details at the bright end. A logarithmic stretch allows you to bring out details at the bright end, but not the faint end. Instead of these, choose an asinh (inverse hyperbolic sine) stretch, which is able to bring out both the faint and bright features. It scales linearly at the faint end and logorithmically at the bright end, giving you the best of both worlds.

The second is in the handling of saturation: how to display pixels that are too bright for the chosen stretch. Most apply the stretch separately in the red, green and blue channels. This makes the cores of bright objects appear as white in the color image, while they are surrounded by a halo that is more appropriate to the actual color of the object. The color of a pixel should instead be set by considering all of the channels together. This way, bright objects will have a uniform color, regardless of whether the stretch has been saturated in any of the channels.

See here for a direct comparison between the classic approach and this (not really) new algorithm on the old Hubble Deep Field.

If you would like to adopt this algorithm for your own work, there is a python implementation that you might find useful.

This is my second try at the Andromeda galaxy. Still very noisy but happy with the result nonetheless, except the star shape and coma.

• Samyang 135mm f2.0 lens
• Fuji XT-5
• 410 lights @20s
• calibrated and stacked in Siril
• background extraction with GraXpert
• star removal with Starnet++
• stretched in Siril with GHST and levels in PS
• final editing, star recomposition and cropping in PS

I did some astrophotography back in 2014 with some pretty basic gear I scrounged together second hand, and I've been wanting to get back into it for a while but the software situation has always put me off. I got some good results from my free trial of pixinsight but it didn't make sense to purchase. I had another go recently with Siril and got a promising result, so I did a bit more and got this.

It's 1298 * 1" lights untracked shot with my Sony A7Cii and an old Minolta 75-300 lens just on a tripod on my balcony.

This was my very first attempt at planetary imaging with my SCT6. I've been doing EAA work for a few years now, but mostly DSOs through the use of a Hyperstar. Last night I removed the Hyperstar from the rig and made my first attempts at imaging at the native 1500mm focal length.

This was a 5 minute video processed with lucky sampling.

Equipment:

• GSO 8" Dobsonian
• QHY 715c

Processing:

• Pre-processed with pipp
• Stacked with autostakkert
• edited in gimp

Shot with an unmodified Nikon D5300 DSLR (45mm f/4.5 lens, ISO 1000)

20x 150s unguided exposures (50 minutes total integration time)

Preprocessed in Lightroom

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker

Stretched and post-processed in Pixinsight

My second attempt shooting jupiter with my new planetary cam, this time actually in focus. Also got surprised when i found out there was an eclipse happening.

GSO 8" Dob + QHY 715c

Stacked in autostakkert (best 30% of 9000 frames)

Edited in astrosurface

QHY 715C, 8" dob Stacked in autostakkert (best 25% of 30000 frames) Edited with registax and gimp (and siril to remove green cast).

Equipment details:

• Mount: OpenAstroMount by OpenAstroTech
• Lens: Sony 200-600 @ 600mm f/7.1
• Camera: Sony A7R III
• Guidescope: OpenAstroGuider (50mm, fl=163) by OpenAstroTech
• Guide Camera: SVBONY SV305m Pro
• Imaging Computer: ROCKPro64 running INDIGO server

Acquisition & Processing:

• Imaged and Guided/Dithered in Ain Imager
• 420x30s lights, 40 darks, 100 flats, 100 biases, 100 dark-flats over two nights
• Prepared data and stacked in SiriLic
• Background extraction, photometric color calibration, generalized hyperbolic stretch transform, and StarNet++ in SiriLic
• Adjusted curves, enhanced saturation of the nebula and recombined with star mask in GIMP, desaturated and denoised background

This is my first time doing a multi-night image, and my first time using SiriLic to configure a Siril script. Any tips there would be helpful. Suggestions for improvement or any other form of constructive criticism are welcome!

Jupiter taken last night from my backyard.

Gear:

• GSO 8" dobsonian
• QHY 5III 715C

Processing:

• Stacked in autostakkert (best 50% of 9000 frames)
• Edited in registax

I am often on the road when I'm near a dark sky sight and I don't have access to my home computer which has the software I use to see what's in the sky. This website is fast, easy, ad-free and accurate. Everything you need from a Planisphere. If you don't know about Ernie Wright then you should browse the site a bit. He is a NASA visualization expert that is responsible for some of the famous images that you are probably already familiar with.