lefty7283

I guess my astrophotography hobby has cancelled out my drinking and porn hobbies lol

If you're going into deep sky imaging, getting a solid tracking mount will be more important than a specific camera/lens. I'll be honest I haven't really bought new gear or looked at new equipment in the last few years, but this vid from Alaskan Astro is a great overview and recommendations for beginner setup (I see the 135mm f/2 has already been recommended in here lol). It's also worth checking out used equipment if you're on a budget. I've found some great deals on the cloudynights classifieds, craigslist, and FB marketplace when I was assembling my rig.

Also since you want to use your camera for astro and normal photography, you can still use a H-alpha modded camera, but just use a custom white balance for non-astro shots. Personally I wouldn't worry too much about getting a modded cam if you're just starting out in the hobby, but it's something you may want to consider if you want to shoot a lot of emission nebulae

Iirc the original goal was ‘at least 10’ but maybe up to 100 flights for a booster. No way to really know without flying them a lot

It’s definitely real, at least for the amateur astronomy subs I (used to) mod. I suspect a lot of the traffic to askastrophotography or telescopes is from people googling stuff and browsing though mobile web, but since /r/astrophotography is just photos, most are just on the app

Probably varies a bit from sub to sub, but old reddit users are a clear minority. The vast majority use the app

yeah

I sent a scouting mission and eventually I wanna put a base on Urlum's small moon Priax near one of the poles. Although it looks like a regular fuel tank slapped on the front with a chemical engine, it's actually a The main propulsion is the NSW engine from the Far Future Technologies mod, and the whole ship has well over 500k dV which is great for zipping around the Kerbol system. In another ksp game I did a few years ago I used basically this same ship design to visit every body in the Minor Planets Expansion mod.

Mildew is trying to sleep in today

NASA is still doing a seat exchange and launching Johnny Kim on the next Soyuz in March, but it looks like it’ll be just Russians on at least the next 2 Soyuz’s after that

with my luck it's gonna pop in november just after it sinks behind some trees for the season

I made this comparison a while ago, and figured I'd share it since I've seen some headlines going around the last couple days...

The Moon's orbit isn't a perfect circle, and at times is a little closer and a little farther away from Earth. It's called a supermoon when the moon is full and at its closest point, and a micromoon when its full and at its furthest point

I wanted to make this comparison to highlight that the supermoon isn't really that much larger than normal. Personally I think the supermoon is overhyped for what it is, and that it's hard to tell visually that the moon is larger or smaller, unless you do a direct comparison like this. The moon can appear larger than normal when its close to the horizon, but the actual size of it is no different than if it was straight overhead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion

The angular diameters and distances were taken from a planetarium program called Stellarium. I compared the pixel measurements of my photos to the values calculated by Stellarium, and the discrepancy was only 0.22%.

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: (Camera at Unity Gain, -20°C for supermoon, -10°C for micromoon)

• Astronomik Red filter used to combat atmospheric seeing

• Exposure- 0.213ms for supermoon, 1.115ms for micromoon

• 1000 frame capture for supermoon

• 2000 frame capture for micromoon

Capture Software:

• Captured using Sharpcap and N.I.N.A. for filterwheel and focuser control

Processing:

• Supermoon: Best 10% of frames stacked in Autostakkert!3

• Micromoon: Best 25% of frames stacked

• Registax Wavelets for sharpening on both images

• Level and curve adjustments in Photoshop

• Images combined and annotated in Photoshop

It may not be as big or well known as the other well known cluster in Hercules (M13), but it sure looks nice. Captured over 4 nights in July/August 2024 from a Bortle 9 zone

Places where I host my other images:

Instagram | Flickr

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-120MC for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 6 hours 55 minutes (Camera at half Unity Gain, -15°C)

• Lum - 209x60"

• Red - 78x60"

• Green - 62x60"

• Blue - 66x60"

• Flats- 30 per filter

• 24 JimmyFlats per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A.

PixInsight Processing:

• BatchPreProcessing (with premade JimmyFlats)

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• DynamicCrop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

$T * med(model) / model

Luminance:

• BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)

• ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear

RGB:

• ChannelCombinaiton to combine monochrome R, G, B stacks into color image

• BlurXTerminator (correct only mode)

• SpectroPhotometricColorCalibration

• HSV Repair

• ArcsinhStretch + histogramtransformation to bring nonlinear

• Curves to saturate it a little

• MLT for large scale chrominance noise reduction

Nonlinear:

• LRGBCombination with stretched L as luminance

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Several CurveTransformations to adjust lightness, contrast, colors, saturation, etc.

• Invert > SCNR > invert > SCNR to remove some greens and magentas

• More curves

• A little bit of noiseXterminator

• DynamicCrop in on the clustert

• Resample to 75%

• Annotation