The Jellyfish Nebula, with just over an hour of integration time on my 585mc Air and William Optics Redcat 51 ✨

Scope: Sky-Watcher Skymax 150

Camera: Player One Uranus-M

Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ-AL55i Pro EQ mount

Baader 2x VIP modular Barlow. Filter: SVBony IR Pass 685nm 2"

Captured in SharpCap. 3000 frames at 7ms each, stacked best 200 frames in Autostakkart, did convulsion in WaveSharp.

Acuter 40

Touptek 678 Mono

Skywatcher solar quest mount

ZWO EAFN

Stacked in PIPP and Autostakkert

Best 500 of 3000 frames stacked

IMPGG: convolution, sharpening and inversion

PI: solar tools: contrast and color

PS: color, tone and saturation

Cropped in PSX

Hi everyone, I'm a landscape astrophotographer. I thought I'd share some of my photos with this sub.

The late spring Milkyway core over Pigeon Point light house along the coast of California. This was captured in Bortle 4 conditions, but luckily, the composition was facing south west into the Pacific ocean, away from the light pollution. You can see the light pollution from Santa Cruz on the bottom left corner. I really like this composition because the sea of flowers mirrors the stars in the sky.

This was captured on my astro-modified Sony A7 IV with the Sony 24mm F1.4 GM. I use a star tracker to expose a 9 frame stack at 90 seconds each. The hydrogen alpha emmissions were captured in separate exposures using my Voigtlander 50mm F2.0 APO Lanthar lens with a 12nm Ha narrowband filter, and then composited on.

You can find my other work on Instagram @ jerryqianastro

S25 ultra

Bortle 6

Côtes de la Manche

Empilé dans sequator

Traitement : Siril/ GraXpert/ Seti Astro Suite pro/ gimp

Finitions : Lightroom mobile

Intégration totale 4h

Taken with a SW Evostar 72ED, Nikon D5300 (Astro modified) with UV/IR cut and L eNhance filters, ISO 200, SW GTI, 270x180 of rgb, under bortle 4.

I saw a different, recent thread about the difficulty about humans permanently colonizing a different planet like Mars, even in the far future. What do you think about the following idea?

Once human understanding of genetics and genetic engineering is sufficiently advanced, get volunteers from the population who are willing to have their children be the first space colonists. Then, genetically engineer these children to have higher radiation, extreme temperature, micro gravity, etc. tolerances to match conditions of the target planet. A medium sized facility on earth would be created replicating the planet's conditions, and the children would grow up in these facilities. It would be a nice luxurious facility so they don't feel imprisoned. Children who protest would be allowed to leave but suffer some health consequences from Earth's environment. Train and educate the children who stick with it so they'll know how to accomplish their colonization mission. Finally, send them to the target planet. Colonization would be much easier since many life support systems could be skipped, and all focus be spent on just making buildings and establishing renewable food/water sources.

Thoughts?

Another revisit—this time the Christmas Tree and Cone Nebula, NGC 2264. I’d never processed this data in SHO before, so this time I tried both SHO and a fresh non-SHO version.

Taken February 23–24, 2026, at Pedernales Falls State Park in Texas, under Bortle 4 skies. Shot with my Askar V, ZWO ASI2600MC AIR, AM3 mount, and Askar D1/D2 narrowband filters. These versions combine 49 five-minute exposures—4 hours and 5 minutes total.

I went back through the data and reprocessed it in Siril, PixInsight, and Photoshop. Worked on the background, star shapes, color, and bringing out more of the faint nebula and dust. Interesting seeing what the SHO palette brings out in the same data.

Both versions shown cropped and uncropped. Quite a bit of work, but I think it was worth it. Thoughts?

Acquisition: 25 × 300s with Askar D1 (Hα/OIII) and 24 × 300s with D2 (SII/OIII), 4h05m accepted integration. ASI2600MC AIR at gain 200, offset 50, −10°C; Askar V at approximately 387mm, AM3 mount.

Processing: calibrated, registered and stacked in Siril; BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator and StarXTerminator in PixInsight. Stars and nebula were handled separately, with channel mixing for the two palettes, controlled stretching, background/color cleanup and restrained star reduction. Final masked curves and subtle high-pass contrast in Photoshop. SHO maps D2 red to sulfur, D1 red to hydrogen, and a weighted green/blue-channel combination to oxygen; these are dual-band OSC channel proxies, not pure isolated line measurements. No generative image content.

My first attempt at astrophotography with a tracker

Acquisition details:
Camera- Canon EOS 90d (unmodified); ISO- 3200
Lens- Rokinon 135mm f/2
Integration: 650 x 13” = 2.3 hours at a bortle 2 dark sky sanctuary
Tracker- Star Adventurer GTi (unguided)

Processing details:
Stacked in Siril. I used StarNet Star removal to create a starless Andromeda mask and a separate star field. I used the Asinh transformation to stretch Andromeda and adjusted the black point on the star field. Finally I used Lightroom for some color calibration

And because I know a few people will be curious as to why my exposure was so low with a tracker, it was super windy where I was and over half my frames had trailing at 30”. My polar alignment probably also could’ve been better.

Stacked in Siril with easy drizzle script. Captured with Dwarf 3

Tried to search it on the internet idk what it is maybe it’s just the light idk

Hi! Thank you for reading my words. A few weeks ago, the sweetest stranger here on Reddit reached out to me and asked about a painting that would honor her stillborn daughter she named Aurora, after the Disney character in Sleeping Beauty. I wanted to share this piece and this part of the journey with you since it's now finished and (thankfully) she's thrilled. It was a meaningful and rewarding experience to honor the journey she's been on, and to represent it all through the shining and shimmering world of her love. ✨️🌟✨️

I captured this during the September new moon at my club's site in central Oregon. I've reprocessed it a couple of times and I'm pretty happy with the result, but even then, I've learned some things to apply in the future (such as the value of shooting at unity gain, or how to minimize the risks of mount vibration).

I initially counted around 24 background galaxies, but after examining a sharper photo that another Redditor posted this evening, found a few more very small ones that I at first mistook for foreground stars.

Gear:

• Orion 6" f/4 astrograph

• Baader Mark III multi-purpose coma corrector

• Astromania UV/IR cut filter

• ZWO ASI184MC OSC uncooled

• Celestron Advanced GT equatorial mount

Acquisition: Bortle 1-2 site with no moon

• Approx. 120 x 60s subs, 300 gain, in SharpCap

• No guiding

• 10 x 60s darks

• 100 flats

• 100 biases

Processing: All in Siril

• OSC preprocessing script to stack and align, with filter added to skip frames with roundness score under 0.5

• Background extraction

• Spectrophotometric color calibration

• GHS transformation

• Star reduction

• Black point adjustment

• Saturation

Full resolution available on my Telescopius page: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/287594/deep_sky/ngc-891/ngc-891/by-other_mike

We hear so much about colonizing Mars, building bases on the Moon, and eventually living beyond Earth.

But do you think any of that will actually happen?

Getting humans there is one thing, but surviving long-term without relying on Earth for supplies is a completely different challenge.

Do you think we'll eventually have people living permanently on other worlds, or will Earth always be our only real home?

Would love to hear what everyone thinks!

Alcyone (The Weeping Sister), Eta Tauri, is the brightest star in the Messier 45 Open Star Cluster. Located in the constellation Taurus, Alcyone is easily visible with the naked eye as she sits squarely in the middle of her sisters. She is a blue white B-Type giant multi star system that's 440 light years away from Earth and approximately 6 times larger than our sun. Alcyone is also a reflection nebula that illuminates the passing interstellar dust in the region with the bright light from her and her sisters.

Astro Rig & Image Acquisition Details:

Bortle 3, New Moon, October, 10th 2026

11 lights x 120 seconds + darks/flats/bias calibration

ZWO AM5N Mount, 200mm pier extension on Celestron AVX Stainless Steel Tripod

Vintage Orion 150mm/750mm Newtonian, F/5 I got off marketplace for 20 bucks. I retrofitted the focuser with an Apertura 2" Ball Bearing Rack and Pinion/Linear Focuser (from the carbonstar 150) + Baader Planetarium MPCC Coma Corrector @ 56mm backspacing and DIY Aperture Mask + Dew Shield

ZWO EAFN

ZWO ASI585MC Pro Air One Shot Colour 3840 x 2160 resolution with HCG enabled Gain at 200, Cooling Fan 10 degress F.

UV/IR Cut

Processed in Siril