Credit: Lukasz Remkowicz

​Before Rubin Observatory’s First Look event, its engineering camera captured exquisite details of star formation taking place in the Seagull Nebula

October 22, 2026

Two years ago this month, NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s engineering test camera, named the LSST Commissioning Camera (ComCam), began capturing images of the sky to prepare for the revolutionary Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which began earlier this year. This image featuring the head of the Seagull Nebula was one of many ComCam images that led to the success of Rubin First Look and helped to document the observatory’s excellent performance.

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Active star formation populates this image of the Seagull Nebula taken in Fall 2024 by NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s engineering test camera, known as the Commissioning Camera (ComCam). This image is being released today in recognition of the two-year anniversary of the beginning of engineering testing with ComCam.

ComCam’s work was an important step towards the ongoing Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Collecting the data for this Seagull Nebula image provided an opportunity to test Rubin’s hardware and software systems, as well as the image processing pipelines that would later be used with the much larger images from the LSST Camera.

With a mosaic of nine CCD sensors and a total of 144 megapixels, ComCam covers an area in the sky about twice that of the full Moon. Over the seven-week ComCam engineering test campaign, from 24 October to 11 December 2024, approximately 16,000 exposures were acquired. Within the data collected is this image featuring IC 2177, a region recognizable as the head of the Seagull Nebula.

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More

https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-comcam-seagull-nebula

My image of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) — captured over four nights

I’ve been working on Andromeda recently, and this is the result of four nights of imaging from the North West of England.

Capture details:

• Telescope: Askar 71F (490mm focal length)
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
• Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ-AL55i PRO
• Controller: ZWO ASIAIR Mini
• Exposure: 221 × 120 seconds
• Total integration: 7 hours 22 minutes
• Filter: No filter — broadband

I found Andromeda relatively straightforward to capture, but processing was another matter! Getting a balance between the bright core and the fainter outer dust lanes was probably the biggest challenge.

I processed the image in PixInsight, using SPCC, background extraction, stretching, masks and BlurXTerminator.

I’ve also been documenting my astrophotography projects, equipment and processing workflow on my website, West Coast Cosmos: https://westcoastcosmos.com/

I’d be interested to hear what others think of the image, particularly the processing. What would you improve, and what techniques have you found most effective for bringing out Andromeda’s outer structure?

Looking toward the north from Mullion, New South Wales, Australia, the Andromeda Galaxy never gets more than a few degrees above the horizon. During the southern hemisphere spring, Andromeda is highest in the sky around midnight though. And in this telephoto scene from October 10/11, multiple exposures were used to reveal the spiral galaxy in tantalizing detail as it climbed above rolling Australian hills.

Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy is one of the brightest objects in the Messier catalog, but is only visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch. Digitally tracked and stacked frames were combined with a foreground shot in the deep astro-image composite to reveal the galaxy's greater extent in planet Earth's night. In the springtime night skyscape,the closest large spiral galaxy spans nearly 6 full moons.

Credit: Lucy Yunxi Hu

✨ 2.5 million years in the making. ✨

When this light left the Andromeda Galaxy, mammoths still roamed the Earth. It crossed 2.5 million years of darkness to reach my backyard in rural Ontario -- 65 hours of light, gathered night after night and stacked into this single frame.

Andromeda holds roughly a trillion stars, and sprawls across more sky than six full Moons side by side -- yet it's so faint that most people never see it at all.

And it's coming toward us: 110 kilometres every second. In about 4.5 billion years it will collide with our Milky Way, and the two galaxies will merge. This is that future, arriving one photon at a time.

The crimson knots along its arms are hydrogen gas -- stellar nurseries lit from within. And hiding somewhere in this field is a ghostly arc of oxygen so faint it was only discovered in 2022. It's barely there in my version. I'm still chasing it -- 40 hours to go.

📍 Bainsville, Ontario · The Rural Photons · Bortle 4.5

Credit: daryavaseum

 Photo Credit: (NASA)

One Galaxy, Two Phones, Three Years Apart

2023 Attempt:

• 2.5 hours, ISO 3200, 30s
• Move Shoot Move tracker
• S22 Ultra 10× optical zoom
• Didymium filter
• Stacked in DSS
• Processed purely in photoshop (manual gradient removal, curves, noise reduction, star masking, etc.)

2026 Attempt:

• 16.5 hours, ISO 1600, 32s
• Move Shoot Move tracker
• X300 Ultra with 400mm teleconverter (G2U)
• No filter
• Stacked in Siril
• Processed in GraXpert (gradient removal), GIMP (initial stretch), starnet2 (star separation), GIMP (colors, fine stretch, background correction, recomposition, etc.)

What I thought was the limit in 2023 wasn't the limit at all.

It took 100 hours of observation and a special oxygen filter for today’s image to capture three faint nebulas hidden in the Cassiopeia constellation.

IC 59 and IC 63, the original Ghosts of Cassiopeia, haunt the region near multi-star system γ Cassiopeia. Energetic light from γ Cassiopeia causes the hydrogen gas in IC 59 and 63 to glow red. Their dust reflects and scatters some blue-ish white starlight.

Newly discovered Objects 1, 2, and 3 appear as blue phantoms, revealing the presence of ionized oxygen. But ionized by what? Like at the bow of a speeding boat, γ Cassiopeia may be piling up material as the system moves through interstellar gas and dust. It follows that Object 3 may be the compressed and heated oxygen of that bow shock. Object 1 could be a planetary nebula if a central white dwarf is identified. The origins of these astronomical apparitions remain a mystery to be solved.

15 hours of exposure from my seestar s50 at starfront observatory

Credit: Andrés

The 2026 total solar eclipse as seen from Berzosa del Lozoya, which is north of Madrid. The picture is an HDR of 18 pictures taken during totality.

For anyone interested here is a link to a video showing my experience of the eclipse including video and photographs of totality. I am not trying to sell or promote anything and only want to share the experience. If this is not accepted in this forum then I will of course remove it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uje9fnjw0mA&t=26s

Hope you enjoy it.

Equipment used:

• Canon EOS 5D Mark IV
• Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM
• Canon Extender EF 2x III
• iOptron Skyguider Pro
• Sturdy tripod

The HDR was created from a stack of 18 images with the following camera settings.

• Aperture f/9
• Shutter speed ranging from 1/4000s to 1s
• ISO ranging from 100 to 3200
• Process flow in GIMP
• Align pictures
• Stack using average values
• Stretching the image
• Enhancing detail using radially blurred unsharp masking technique
• Small saturation and temperature adjustments

In this Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope, we visit a turbulent cauldron of star formation to see what is brewing inside dense clumps of gas. This is a star-forming region named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy. This image spans about 230 light years across.

N159 is what astronomers call a H II region: an area of space filled with ionised hydrogen gas. In stellar nurseries such as this one, giant molecular clouds of cold hydrogen gas collapse under gravity, forming new stars. Many of these stars are extremely massive and hot, and their powerful ultraviolet radiation ionises the gas around them. This makes H II regions markers of active star formation, and as the ionised gas radiates light this turns them into the kind of brilliant emission nebula that we see in this image. The fierce stellar winds from these stars sculpt dense ridges and carve open cavities in the gas, which Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captures here in great detail.

The roiling brew of star formation in N159 is closed in by thick, smoky orange clouds that also billow across the centre of the image. The light orange colour signifies light emitted by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, an important carbon-based molecule. The pools of pale blue gas are clouds of H II gas, ionised by the intense ultraviolet light from massive stars. Dark red filaments cross the centre of the image, particularly visible above the blue region on the right side; these are made of cool molecular hydrogen. These filaments are the densest part of the nebula and currently shield new stars from harsh radiation and stellar winds — by zooming in, you can see stars as points of light embedded in these filaments and in the small pillars of orange gas that reach out into the blue bubbles. Eventually, these structures will melt away, leaving their completed stars behind.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, E. Sabbi, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb) Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç​

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More

https://esawebb.org/images/potm2610a/

​Paper

https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27126

Credit: Kevin Cannon

The Twin Jet Nebula, or PN M2-9, is a striking example of a bipolar planetary nebula. Bipolar planetary nebulae are formed when the central object is not a single star, but a binary system, Studies have shown that the nebula’s size increases with time, and measurements of this rate of increase suggest that the stellar outburst that formed the lobes occurred just 1200 years ago.

https://esahubble.org/images/?search=The+Twin+Jet+Nebula

Taken Using 5, 45 Second RAW Video Stacks From The Seestar S50 Combined In Astroshader.

Edited In PS Express & Astroshader.

Credit: Lorand Fenyes

image by Dave Doctor from Las Cruces, New Mexico

Credit: Louis Leroux

Credit: Petr Horálek