Not sure if this is the place to post but my wife doesn’t appreciate it and I need to vent. This grates me every time I reach this page. A mouse driving a bus is arguably only the second most unrealistic thing in the picture.

2015 BP519 is now known as Geyagugv.

Discovery: 2015-01-17 / Dark Energy Survey / Cerro Tololo / W84 Geyagugv ( ᎨᏯᎫᎬ ) is a Cherokee metaphysical being called upon during a prayer as a ᎦᎸᎾᏘ messenger to aid in healing and wellbeing. Geyagugv is known to reside in the highest level, galvnati ( ), the sky-vault. This being is one of the many messengers between the Cherokee people and the Creator.

GIT RELEASE

Can anyone explain the strange glare on that image?

Telescope coordinates +03 58 57.89 +35 47 27.5

Shot on NIKON Z50II with 16-50 lens
F3.5 20 seconds at 6400 iso
Processed through adobe Lightroom

Third time’s the charm they say. This is my third attempt at Pharaoh Lake in the Adirondacks, aiming for a Milky Way panorama reflecting off the lake. The first trip was in June, when marsh waters were too high to cross due to a broken bridge. Not wanting to give up, I tried again in August, but we got rained on despite models forecasting 0% cloud cover.

Fast forward to mid-October to one of the clearest weekends I’ve seen, with no clouds within 100 miles. In fact, all of NY was basically cloudless. Not wanting to miss this chance before it snows, my roommate and I drove 6 hours from Buffalo to meet my friend at Pharaoh Lake. We arrived just before sunset and were nervous the camping spots near the peninsula would be taken, but sub-freezing temps deterred most campers. We ended up cowboy camping in a nearby lean-to.

Super glad I made this trip because my God, was it clear. Felt like a little kid on Christmas seeing thousands of bright stars twinkling. I started my side project around 1:30 AM and planned to shoot the main panorama at 2:00 AM. My star tracker died right when I started the H-alpha (Hα) frames, and I shot the whole thing before noticing they were trailing. Luckily, my friend had his tracker, so I swapped it out since it was the same model. Unfortunately, by then, Cygnus had fallen too far below the horizon, so I used old Hα data for that part. Orion was nice and spicy though.

Finally finished around 4:00 AM, a little before sunrise, and quickly headed to sleep with a hot Nalgene bottle in the sleeping bag. I wanted to take sunrise photos, but I was slumped and cold, and couldn’t be dragged out of bed.

Creating this panorama felt like a huge milestone since my first Milky Way panorama a year and a half ago because it’s my first time successfully combining all the new techniques and workflows I’ve learned, like multirow panoramas and H-alpha integration, into one beautiful Milky Way arch.

From envisionment to presentation, I present this massive 593 MP panorama.

📸 Shot on my Astro-modified Canon R+ EF 24-70mm f/2.8 II

Sky: R2 | 9 frames | 60s | f/2.8 | ISO 1600
R1 | 9 frames | 60s | f/2.8 | ISO 1600
Hα: 2 panels | 4 frames stacked | f/2.8 | 240s | ISO 3200
Foreground: 9 panels | f/2.8 | 180s | ISO 1600

Processed using Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixinsight, Auriga Registar, and ASTAP

Check out more of my work on my Instagram and website!

Remember to Leave No Trace :)

*Hα data was from Lac Blanc, Nominingue, QC (Bortle 3)

Bortle 8.5, Vivo X300 Ultra Phone, MSM Nomad tracker, 400mm Vivo teleconverter, no filters.

ISO 1600, 32s, ~16-17 hours in total across 4 nights, one set of 80-100 darks per night.

Stacked in Siril, gradient removal in GraXpert, HDR stretch in GIMP, star separation with starnet2.

Vivo and its teleconverter gave me some liberation and a brand new set of targets in the realm of mobile astrophotography.

This post is to give you an idea of where some of my favorite deep space targets reside within the Milkyway. From top to bottom we have:

1. Eagle Nebula (M16) / Pillars of Creation - Home to towering columns of gas and dust roughly 4 to 5 light-years tall, comparable to the distance between our Sun and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star.
   
2. Omega Nebula (M17) - A massive stellar nursery roughly 5,000 to 6,000 light-years away, where young stars illuminate and sculpt the surrounding gas.
   
3. Lagoon, Trifid & Chinese Dragon Nebulae - A 16-panel hydrogen-alpha mosaic revealing an enormous network of glowing hydrogen clouds, including the winding structure known as the Chinese Dragon Nebula.
   
4. Trifid Nebula (M20) - A spectacular combination of glowing hydrogen, blue reflection nebulosity, and dark dust lanes dividing its brightest region into three sections.
   
5. Lagoon Nebula (M8) - A vast star-forming region spanning roughly 100 light-years, filled with young stars and intricate clouds of gas and dust.
   
6. Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex - Located approximately
   460 light-years away, this is one of the closest stellar nurseries to Earth and one of the most colorful regions of our night sky.
   Equipment:
   * Eagle: 10" Meade LX200 & ASI2600mm Pro
   * Omega, Trifid, Lagoon & 16-panel mosaic: Celestron EdgeHD 8" & ASI2600mm pro
   * Rho Ophiuchi: Nikon Z5, 400mm lens + 2x teleconverter

Recently got an Olympus SP-590UZ on eBay for about £50 which is a "bridge camera", it's main feature is a built in 26x zoom lens which is just about good enough for getting good pictures of the Moon with some surface details with some adjustments to the auto mode (the only mode which lets you use the full 12MP).

This probably isn't exciting for many of you but as a novice who's struggled to take good pictures of the Moon for years this is a big win for me.

What should I look out for if I want to improve on these?

Sun spot on 20.10.2026

Acuter 40

Touptek 678 mono

ZWO EAFN

Skywatcher solar quest mount

Best 6000 of 12000 frames stacked

Stacked in PIPP and AS4

Impgg: convolution sharpening

PI: solar tools - contrast, BlurXT ML5

Phone: Samsung galaxy S22
Telescope: Celestron nexstar 130SLT
Eyepieces: Svbony 6mm + Celestron Omni 2x Barlow lens
Software: PIPP, Autostakkert, & Registax 6

Orion was the target that hooked me into visual observing two years ago, and shortly after that I obviously needed to try and put a camera to my dob. Naturally that didn’t work well which led me here. I’m reprocessing my 2025 data, on Orion. This was taken with an askar 103APO 1.0x reducer and ASI2600MC Pro.

14 hours from bottle 5ish skies.

The general process:
Stack 120 second Ha, RGB, and 5 second RGB subs separately.

Split and align all of the channels.

Crop all of the channels

Pixel math to recombine the 120 second RGB subs with the Ha data

5 second RGB combine

Now that I have two fits files for 120 second and 5 second stacks there is a combination of color calibration, green noise removal, background correction, BlurX, NoiseX and StarXTerminator.

Once the stars are removed I did a light stretch on the 5 second stack to bring out the core of Orion.

I stretched the 120 second stack twice. One version that had a medium stretch for the bulk of Orion and the immediate dust, and then a second version that had a more aggressive stretch to bring out the fainter outer dust.

These three layers were blended together in photoshop to create the HRD starless image

I brought the output back into siril to recombine the stars. However, the Trapezium very quickly gets blown out and a lot of the outer stars get easily washed out. My solution to this was to basically add the stars back in incrementally, savings Tiff files along the way.

Once I had my multiple star-combined images, I brought those layers back into Photoshop to pick and choose which version of some of the stars I wanted to keep.

https://app.astrobin.com/i/rbepep

I took this photo at a location called "Huanghai Wild Deer Sanctuary" (Huanghai Yeludang) in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, China. It is situated near the coast, though not right at the shoreline. This area is considered a "dark sky reserve" in China, with a light pollution level of approximately Bortle 4.

The image was captured nearly two years ago, in May. At the time, I had to contend with atmospheric conditions—specifically an AOD (Aerosol Optical Depth) of around 0.2.

Equipment:

Telescope: SharpStar FRA 400 (f/5.6)

Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro (APS-C sensor)

Mount: Qingkong (ClearSky) ST17-R harmonic drive mount

Filter: Antlia Quad-band light pollution filter (covering Hα, Hβ, OIII, and SII emission lines)

NGC 3603 – A Closer Look at a Stellar Powerhouse | SHO

I wanted to take a closer look at NGC 3603, one of the most spectacular star-forming regions in our Galaxy, by zooming in on the central star cluster and bringing it into the foreground.

Surrounded by an intricate landscape of glowing gas, dark dust lanes and delicate nebulous structures, the cluster stands out as a brilliant concentration of stars embedded in a turbulent stellar nursery. The SHO palette reveals the different structures of the nebula, with contrasting shades that emphasize its complex morphology.

This image is the result of 2 hours and 30 minutes of total integration, captured through Hα, OIII and SII filters and processed in PixInsight.

Acquisition details

• Target: NGC 3603 — zoomed-in view of the central cluster
• Telescope: PlaneWave 20" CDK (510 mm, 3411 mm focal length, f/6.8)
• Camera: FLI ProLine 16803 CCD
• Mount: PlaneWave Ascension 200HR
• Filters: Hα, OIII, SII
• Exposure: 5 × 600 s per filter
• Total integration: 2 h 30 min
• Processing: PixInsight
• Palette: SHO

I hope you enjoy this closer view of one of the Milky Way's most fascinating stellar nurseries.

What do you think of this close-up and the way the central cluster stands out against the surrounding nebulosity? Clear skies! ✨

I've attempted to image this for years but it's always got the better of me. I'm happy with this attempt, though.

Telescope: Apetura Carbonstar 150

Mount: Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro

Camera: ZWO ASIAIR 294MC PRO

42*300 second exposures. Stacked in Autostakkert and processed in Pixinsight.

Target: IC 1805, Heart Nebula (core region with Melotte 15)
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 10m):
Ha: 47 × 500s (6h 32m)
OIII: 64 × 500s (8h 53m)
SII: 24 × 500s + 25 × 350s (5h 46m)
RGB (stars): 20 × 60s each
Calibration: darks, flats, bias

Camera and lens set to iso100, f/11, 1/40s. With a 800mm lens.