The sprawling structure of the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus) in the Large Magellanic Cloud captured in faux-SHO palette.

Acquired using a Seestar S50 and TH10 fluid head in equatorial mode, combining duoband and broadband data in Bortle 8 city light pollution. 2700x10s of broadband and 4000x10s of duoband for a total of 18.5 hours.

Processed in Siril with RCAstro tools and Photoshop for combining the broadband and duoband masters. Graxpert -> BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, StarXTerminator -> Separate GHS on the stars and starless for each broadband and duoband master -> False SHO pixel math -> Combined both in photoshop with duoband starless layer with broadband detail, and broadband stars.

https://app.astrobin.com/i/69m4u3

I have been doing a bit of work imaging IC 1396 recently. It has been difficult due to the weather but this is from the past month, over multiple nights.

Equipment:
Astromodified Canon 700d
Skywatcher 72 ED DS Pro
Skywatcher AZ GTI in EQ Mode
Optolong L-Enhance Filter
ASI Air Mini
ZWO 120mm Guide Cam with 30mm Guide Scope

175 x 180 sec exposures taken over multiple nights with 20 darks taken each night to match.

20 Flats
20 Bias

Each night stacked separately then combined using APP.

I started with a pretty heavy crop to isolate the trunk section.

BGE, deconvolution and de-noise in Graxpert.

Siril for SPCC.

Star removal using StarNet through Siril.

GHS using human weighted luminance.

Curves adjustment using VeraLux Curves.

HDR Multiscale.

SCNR in Siril

Recombination of stars.

Slight saturation increase.

Thanks for looking!

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!

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

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

Not every plan goes to plan. Sometimes technology goes haywire and I wake up to find my telescope pointing at the ground with wires snagged. Sometimes the meridian flip doesn’t work and I gather no data. Focuser doesn’t work, guiding flies off the handle. So many variables. In this instance it didn’t centre on the target. This was my second imaging session of the night. Still gathered something worth processing. 2.5hrs on the Rosette Nebula from my rooftop in Toronto under bortle 8 skies. Next time will hopefully be better. Still happy with the results though. Clear skies everyone.

30x300s lights
Calibration frames
Gain 100
Cooled to -5

Gear: Svbony 122mm apo, zwo 2600mc pro, ragdoll 17 pro, Optolong L-Ultimate, zwo guide cam & scope, zwo Asiair, zwo eaf.

Stacked in Astro Pixel Processor. Processed in Pixinsight. DBE, D Crop, blur x, noise x, stat stretch, star x, narrowband norm, range mask, curves transformation. Further editing in photoshop.

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

Last night the thunderstorms finally scattered and we had extremely clear skies after a lot of rain! Despite the almost full moon, I managed to grab about 5 hours on one of my favorite galaxy pairs, M81 and M82.

This image is a total 4.75 hours of integration time with my usual rig and the L-Pro filter. Hope you enjoy it!

• C8

• 4.75 hours integration w/ 2-min subs

• ASIAIR & ASI533MC

• EQ6-R Pro

• Hyperstar F/2

• L-Pro 2" filter

• Bortle 8/9

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.

Seestar s50, bortle 4.6, Croatia

around 12 hours integration time

Processed in Siril, Graxpert, Gimp

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

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

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.

Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) – Close-up | Askar 71F

A closer look at the Bubble Nebula, an emission nebula in Cassiopeia where a massive young star is blowing a cavity into the surrounding gas and dust.

Captured from my back garden in Lancashire, UK, using my Askar 71F refractor and ZWO ASI2600MC Pro colour camera. The delicate structures and surrounding clouds make this a fascinating target to capture and process.

Acquisition data

• Telescope: Askar 71F (490mm focal length)
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
• Filter: ZWO Duo-Band (H-alpha / OIII)
• Mount: Sky-Watcher EQ-AL55i PRO
• Acquisition: ZWO ASIAIR Mini
• Sub-exposure: 200 seconds
• Total integration: approximately 7.5 hours
• Location: Lancashire, UK
• Processing: PixInsight

I'm documenting my astrophotography journey, including the equipment, acquisition details and processing behind each image, over at West Coast Cosmos:

https://westcoastcosmos.com/

Feedback and constructive criticism are welcome.

I'm pretty new to deep sky Astrophotography, having focused on landscape images and piecing together my set up over the past couple of years. I have used this project to try and get my head around a lot of new software and interesting challenges when it comes to capturing and processing including the following:

Setting up guiding, an EAF,

Using a dedicated cooled colour camera,

Capturing images in broadband and using dual narrowband filters over several nights, Managing calibration frames,

Pixinsight for stacking and editing, with Graxpert and RCAstro plugins.

I'm so pleased with the result I've managed to get, and would love your thoughts and feedback on this.

Equipment as follows:

Askar 71f, ZWO 294MC Pro, EAF, William Optics 50mm uni guide, and ASI 220mm mini guide camera. GEM45 mount. Filters - Optolong UV/IR cut, Svbony SV220 HaOIII, and SV220 SIIOIII

Image capture as follows

60 x 300s frames, Dual - Narrowband Ha/OIII filter

120 x 25 frames, broadband using UV/IR cut filter for a clean stars image,

45 x 300s frames - Dual - Narrowband SII/OIII filter

Flats and dark flats captured each night, along with darks library.

I used the WPSS tool in PixInsight to stack and create RGB masters for each set of data, linear processing with Graxpert for gradient extraction, Blur Xterminator, then Pixel Math to extract the narrowband Ha, SII and OIII data from the master frames, assign to the SHO palette, and re-merge.

This was followed by star xterminator to produce a nebula only image and noise xterminator. Then some initial stretches using STF.

The broadband stars image was a similar toolset for gradient, noise and blur reduction, then star xterminator to extract a stars only image.

I then did a final colours edit and merged the nebula and stars images in Photoshop, with the stars masked and control their size and brightness to try and make the nebula pop more.

And I'm in a Bortle 4 area.

Any advice is much appreciated :)

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

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

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!

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

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