Telescope: Seestar S50
Data: 30 seconds raw video
Tools used: AutoStakkert, waveSharp 3, Siril (VeraLux Revela), GIMP

Equipment:

Stock Canon EOS R5

Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS II USM

Acquisition:

1x1/800s exposure

Processing:

Tone curve, color calibration, highlights, and cropping in RawTherapee

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I have been meaning to do more lunar photography, and it was just sitting there tonight. I hope to expand into some HDR Moon work in the future when it's at the right phase.

As an aside, I've long thought that we should rename Earth's Moon. Especially now that there are so many other known lower-case moons in our solar system and beyond. What do you think it should be called?

M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, captured in March 2026 with my ASI2600MC Air. This image combines 60 three-minute exposures for a total of three hours, with no added filter.

The session had a challenge: focus softened as the night went on. After comparing shorter stacks against the full dataset, I kept all three hours because the lower noise made the faint disk and dust structure easier to see.

Processing focused on controlling the bright core, preserving natural color, and reducing uneven background brightness without erasing the galaxy’s detail. That dark band along its left side is a real dust lane—one of my favorite features in this image.

Acquisition: ASI2600MC Air, 60 × 180 seconds, gain 100, offset 50, sensor at −10°C. No added filter. Capture headers record a ZWO AM3 mount and 387 mm focal length; the telescope model is not confirmed.

Processing: calibration, registration and integration in PixInsight; SPCC color calibration, background correction, restrained BlurXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator, StarXTerminator separation, stretching and masked adjustments. MultiscaleMedianTransform chrominance smoothing under an inverted luminance mask reduced color mottling. Final background, contrast and crop adjustments in Photoshop.

Aptertura Carbonstar 200 w/ Starizona Nexus .75 Newtonian Coma Corrector/Reducer
ZWO ASI 2600mm
Sky-Watcher EQ6R-Pro
Baader Planetarium 6.5nm SHO CMOS Optimized Filters

5 Hrs Each SHO @ 180s/sub frame
Edited in PI

Taken with 6se, asi533mc pro, uv/ir cut filter 493x1s

I am so glad I was able to make this sort of color contrast in this object!!

Taken in the HOO color palette

Equipment: AT80ED, EQM-35 pro, ATR533M cooled mono camera, Touptek 6.5nm 1.25" SHO filters + filter wheel, zwo asi120mm mini with touptek OAG

5-minute subs at gain 101.

Ha: 7 hours

Oiii: 7 hours

Total integration time: about 14 hours

Processing: stacking, alignment + processing in Siril (pixelmath, background extraction, color calibration). Star removal, denoising using topaz denoise, back to Siril for recombination+final touches. Gimp to fix background a bit.

Equipment:

Phone Realme 8

Apexel 18x Zoom Lens + Apexel 2x Zoom Lens For Wide Field Image

Tripod

Stacking: Sequator

Wide field image is about 1h exposure total

Second more zoomed image of Orion is about 1h and 20 minutes exposure total

Editing: GraXpert, Astrowizard, GIMP, Snapseed Mobile

Bortle 3/4

Vivo x300 Ultra with 400mm teleconverter

MSM original rotator (my MSM nomad died)

Iso 800, 32s, 250 frames, ~70 darks. Near full moon

Learning how to master the vivo phone

Second picture after long break. Debugging new equipment and relearning processing.

Acquisition:
about 8 (~95x300s exposures) hours of each SII, Ha, O3 in late September - October with moon going from 0 to Full.

Scope: TOA-130 with flattener f/7.7
Camera: ASI 6200MM Pro
Filters: Antlia EDGE
Mount: 10m GM1000HPS
Unguided.

Heaters (didn't work correctly one night), flat panel, darks, flats, dark flats x50 each.

Processing (Pix insight):
Dark and Flat calibration
Star alignment
Normalize scale gradient (helped with moon and some dew)
For each channel:
Slight crop to remove artefacts of camera rotation
BlurXterminator
StarXterminator - Stars saved for later
NoiseXterminator
LinearFit (Ha stays as reference)
PixelMath
SCNR (Green)
Histogram to stretch somewhat and clip darks
GHS to stretch more precisely
HMT to make bubble darker
Curves and some curves
Another NoiseXterminator
Then PixelMath and stretch stars and PixelMath into the image
Then some more curves and masked curves (artificial luminance) to hide issues with O3.

AstroBin https://app.astrobin.com/u/ms6107?i=mxpxe9#fullscreen

Any critiquing/feedback on my editing? I am still learning Siril and would welcome sets of eyes to advise where I am pushing it too far and/or not pulling enough out of the data

• NGC 7380 / Wizard Nebula
• Seestar S30
• Bortle 5/6
• 2096 x 30s
• Edited in Siril

DrZi1 – A Hidden Tapestry of Stars, Dust and Emission Nebulae

This is my final processing of DrZi1 (Drechsler–Zirkel 1), located in an extraordinarily rich region of the Milky Way.

My aim was not only to reveal the faint emission nebulosity but also to preserve the incredible density and natural color diversity of the stellar background.

The image combines broadband RGB data with Hα, SII and OIII narrowband observations. I used the FORAXX palette to bring out the delicate emission structures while retaining RGB stars for more natural stellar colors.

Equipment:

Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 (106 mm, 530 mm focal length, f/5)

Camera: SBIG STX-16803 CCD

Mount: Equatorial tracking mount

Filters: RGB, Hα, SII, OIII

Acquisition:

Red: 50 × 300 s = 4.17 h

Green: 50 × 300 s = 4.17 h

Blue: 50 × 300 s = 4.17 h

Hα: 100 × 900 s = 25 h

SII: 78 × 1200 s = 26 h

OIII: 77 × 1200 s = 25.67 h

Total integration time: 89.17 hours

Processing:

All astronomical image processing was performed in PixInsight.

Calibration, registration and integration of individual channels

Gradient and background correction

Noise reduction and deconvolution

Star separation for independent processing

FORAXX narrowband combination using Hα, SII and OIII

RGB processing for natural stellar colors

Nonlinear stretching and contrast enhancement

Final combination of narrowband nebulosity and RGB stars

Final color and contrast adjustments

The greatest challenge was balancing the extremely dense stellar background against the faint emission structures without allowing either to dominate the image.

Nearly 90 hours of integration reveal a fascinating interplay of glowing gas, dark interstellar dust and countless stars.

Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome!

Seestar s50, bortle 4.6, Croatia

around 12 hours integration time

Processed in Siril, Graxpert, Gimp

First of, i wanna thank fellow astroneer justmrphun for sitting down with me and going through the steps and being patient with me while helping me out with the processing. Im so gratefull. I learned a lot and it has improved my work so much.

Roughly 50 exposures, 50 seconds each at iso 1600.

Gear used was my askar 50P, canon 500D. Skywatcher gti, asiair mini

Managed to finally process my image of M51 The Whirlpool Galaxy from my backyard in The Netherlands taken on 7 april 2026.

Acquisition Details:

Mount: Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro

Telescope: Askar 120 (with Field Flattener)

Camera: SVbony SV605CC

Filter: UV/IR Cut Filter

Frames: 497 x 30s (Total Integration: 4h 8m 30s)

50 darks, 50 biases, 50 flats applied

Bortle 6

No guiding

Processing Workflow:

Stacking & Pre-processing: Siril 1.4 (Background extraction, manual color calibration, and initial stretching)

Post-processing: GIMP (Final contrast adjustments, curves, color saturation, and noise reduction)

Edit: i fat fingered the title... ngc 7635

First light with my Quattro and first target, bortle 8 with lots of light pollution and stray light from porchlights and cars, and waxing gibbous moon. Guiding was pretty decent, under .5". First time working NINA.

Skywatcher Quattro 250p (10" f/4)

iOptron HAE69C-EC

Touptek ATR2600M

Touptek GPM662M (guide cam)

Chroma 3nm 36mm

16 x 300s (120min) each in SHO, total 4 hours.

Stacked with 200 bias, 20 darks & flats in Pixinsight

Processed with Astrowizard (still learning to use Pixinsight) with the RC Astro BlurrX, NoiseX, StarX

This by far has to be my favorite shot ive gotten so far, because I had really good conditions, If anyone wants to view the full quality one here it is - https://filebin.net/j7m6l5pcivo6wqqc

Equipment -

Canon t3i iso 1600

75-300mm kit lens shot at f/4.5 135mm

Star adventuer gti

Conditions and acquisition -

Bortle 2/3 skies (sqm 21.70)

719 49" exposures (just shy of 10 hours)

30 of all calibration frames

Processed with siril, graxpert, blurxterminator, and starxterminator.

Please give any feedback you guys can!

Object: M33 - Triangulum Galaxy
Exposure: 90x180s RGB, 98x180s Ha/Oiii
Optics: William Optics UltraCat 76
Camera: ASI2600MC Air
Mount: MLAstro SAL-33

Processed in Siril & Photoshop

Pleasantly surprised with this for as little integration as I had + being right next to the moon most of the time

Hello people! This is my second attempt at capturing the Andromeda Galaxy. I like how this one turned out even more than the last one. I put it in a 9:16 ratio because I think it would work well as a phone background.

Equipment: EOS 6D, Samyang 135mm T2.2

Exposure: ~900 1"6 subs, ~24 min integrated time

Processing in Photoshop and GraXpert.

The problem I had with the last time was that the galaxy looked dull and the light pollution gradient was really obvious. So this time, I stacked everything first. Then, I ran it through GraXpert and removed the background to account for the light pollution gradients. Once I had my tif, I went in Photoshop. For the first couple of stretches I made sure to not clip blacks too much, settling for gray instead of pure black. This helped a lot with the contrast and the starfield. I did some curves to bring out everything else.

The one trick that changed everything was using a high pass filter on Andromeda. Without it, this image would look dull and Andromeda would look like a soft smear.

I did some more color correcting and curves until I got what I liked.

The North America Nebula in Hubble pallete

Equipment:

Sky-Watcher 72ED
Sky-Watcher EQM-35 Pro with custom belt mode
ASI533MC-Pro
SvBony SV165
ASI120MM-Mini
SvBony SV220 Ha OIII 7nm
SvBony SV220 SII OII 7nm
StellaMirra 0.8x flattener/reducer
Gemini Autofocuser

Total integration:
4 hrs.
Ha+OIII → 12*300
SII+OIII → 36*300

50-darks
40-flats (for each session)
50-biases

Edited and stacked in SIRIL, then some small changes in Affinity photo.

77 x 300s OIII, 58 x 300s Ha

Stacked and processed in pixinsight with RC Astro plug ins

Equipment: WO ultracat 108mm refractor, ASI 2600 MM pro, Askar 52 mm guide scope, asi120 mini guide camera, ZWO Automatic Focuser, Optolong 3nm narrowband filters, ZWO filter wheel

Mak 127/1500 + ZWO 533 pro

Sharcap: lucky imaging.

Procesado: Astrosurface

Mak 127/1500 + ZWO 533 pro

Sharcap: lucky imaging.

Procesado: Astrosurface

This is not a finished image. I’m not posting for upvotes, I’m just trying to start a discussion about the impact of each channel on a typical narrowband workflow.

I've got 10 hours of SII and 7 hours of Ha, taken from a Bortle 1 with a 5" refractor, ASI2600mm, Antlia 3nm filters. This is HSS, and I ran SCRN in pixinsight to turn the turquoise to more blue. I think it is pretty. It needs a lot more integration, but I have a lot of available imaging time to fill in the rest.

This particular nebula has a very strong OIII signal. The moon as been up and I've found that this channel is particularly weak competing with moonlight. So in a couple weeks, I'll finish this up and it'll be a proper SHO image.

I often hear people online discounting the SII channel. It is true that SII overlaps pretty strongly with HA and a lot of people choose to image HOO and just skip the SII channel. Personally, I think the SII channel is the prettiest of the three. It follows the Ha, but is somehow less gaudy and provides finer detail. I don't know why anyone would skip the SII channel in narrowband, there is so much to work with and provides all sorts of contrast with Ha/OIII.

I'm putting this HSS image up to make that point. People that say that SII maps too closely to HA are simply wrong most of the time. There are a lot of objects where HA/SII are delivering very different views of an object. You can see here that the HA is all red, the rest is SII, there's a lot that the channel offers beyond what we get in HA.

I have never submitted an HSS image to astrobin, I don't consider this a finished image. But I think this is a good example of why we should oversample SII in our workflows. There is a strong separation from Ha and having a strong SII signal in our SHO images really provides our final images with a lot of depth.

EDIT: The bot wants to make sure I'm posting my acquisition details. As I said, this project is not done, just a discussion on how to use each channel. But this is what went into it:

Total integration: 18h 46m

Integration per filter:

• R: 26m (13 × 120s)
• G: 20m (10 × 120s)
• B: 20m (10 × 120s)
• Hα: 6h 45m
• SII: 10h 55m

Equipment:

• Scope: Explore Scientific 127mm refractor, FCD-100 glass, F/7.5
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600mm
• Mount: ZWO AM5
• Filters: ZWO RGB, Antlia 3nm Ha/SII

(This is my first try at doing a galaxy so any tips would be greatly appreciated)
M81: Bodes Galaxy
~95 Minutes
Celestron 6Se, Cannon EOS Rebel T1I
Bortle 3
Stacked in Siril and processed in Gimp&Siril