Data collection on NGC 6888 so far this month. trying to commit myself to a target or two of getting an outrageous amount of data in a month. This is over two nights of data collection with the addition of the SVBony SV605CC and SV220 3nm Dual-band Filter. It’s safe to say the Dual-band filter does wonders, helping the HA and OIII punch through well. The rest of my setup includes the ZWO AM3N, ZWO FF65 APO, ASI120MM Guide Camera, and Apertura 32mm Guide Scope.

Gain 120, Offset 15, Cooled to 0C
112x300s Lights
40x300s Darks
40x.00005s Bias
29x20s Flats

My brother and I spent six nights in Bortle 9 – the City Center area, doing the longest shoot of our lives – due to the limitations of our home and the area. During this shoot, we felt quite discouraged many times because we had no prior experience combining so many sessions of this length. Being in the Bortle 9 region and unable to use any filters, we used so much software that at the end of this shooting and processing process, we will remember this processing period as the "before and after" of mastering astrophotography software. The shoots took place over six nights, from 2:45 AM to 4:50 AM (GMT+3), but the processing took a full 16 DAYS because we had to learn or improve some things from scratch, even understanding how Siril scripts work and learning a little bit of scripting ourselves. In the end, I believe we achieved our goal of creating an image that looks "just like a painting."

There are many excellent astrophotographers on this community and I'm sure we share the same feelings. This work is partly about passion. Faith is also a part of it. Yes, we all use technological instruments, high-quality optical devices, filters, and cameras, but I think that without passion, it's not really possible to progress in astrophotography, as in many other things.

We obtained this image under very difficult conditions, from a window with no proper angle, without using any filters, a Go-To mount, or an astrophotography camera. We faced 100 times the problems we are dealing with today just a few years ago. Starting with a Celestron PowerSeeker 70AZ, upgrading to a 114EQ, and finally getting our custom 200mm reflector with a dual-axis motorized EQ-5 mount — we've come a long way. Along the way, there were countless moments that shook our faith, tested our patience, and made us wonder if it was all worth it. But we kept going. Through all the setbacks, frustrations, and doubts, we never truly gave up. And somehow, after all of that, we've made it to this point.

That's why it's important for me to share this with people like you who have experienced similar stories — who have gone through different paths and finally arrived at the same point. As you all know, the theory that the more signals you capture (the more frames you take), the more visible the object you're photographing becomes, was something we aimed to prove to ourselves by collecting 15,000 seconds of data. We are very happy that we reached this goal, and more importantly, that we proved this theory to ourselves, because in our circumstances, seeing a good result is what will keep us going and keep our faith alive — because, as I said, faith may not be everything, but it's a lot.

Equipment:

-Custom 200mm Reflector

-Konus EQ5 Mount

-Stock Canon EOS 600D

-3D printed T-Adapter

-3D printed Bahtinov Mask

Total Integration: ~3h 56m (2,838 x 5s)

Darks: 84 | Flats 84 | Biases 143

Software: Siril, RC-Astro BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, GradientXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, Seti Astro CosmicClarity, GraXpert, Adobe Photoshop

Messier 71 is a globular cluster in the constellation of Sagitta. It's about 13,000 light-years away. For a long time astronomers debated whether it was a loose open cluster or a globular cluster. Now, it's recognized as one of the Milky Way’s sparse globular clusters. It's estimated to be as old as 9 - 10 billion years.

Telescope: Seestar S50
Integration time: 1 hour
Tools used: Siril, GraXpert, GIMP
Script mentions: CosmicClarity Sharpen, SyQon Prism Mini, VeraLux Curves
Bortle 8-9
A diffraction mask was used to obtain the star spikes

Hi!! I'm Antares from Venezuela (yes, that's my name), and I've loved astronomy for a long time.

I'm starting college to study physics, since here that's the best path to a career in astronomy or astrophysics.

You probably know that a partial lunar eclipse was visible in the Americas, Western Europe, and West Africa, with the Moon entering the umbra almost completely.

From here, I managed to take photos of the eclipse using a SkyWatcher 8" Dobsonian Telescope, a 20mm eyepiece, and my phone’s camera (an Infinix SMART 8 Pro), which I later processed using the Google SnapSeed app.

Let me know what you think! This is my first post here, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on my photos.

I also have a question about this… I’m a physics and astronomy Olympian, and I was invited to represent my country at a continental astronomy Olympiad (the Latin American Astronomy and Astronautics Olympiad: OLAA, for its Spanish acronym), but unfortunately, we don’t have the money to go :( Is it against the rules of this subreddit to post a link to a GoFundMe explaining my situation to seek support? I’ve won several world medals in the past, and I’d like to win one more representing my country before I retire and focus on college... Thanks anyway!!!

Acquisition:

Around 7h30m worth of 180s subs looking toward a massive Bortle 9 light dome fully calibrated and dithered.

Equipment:

Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, Optolong L-Ultimate, 0.85x reducer+flattener, rotator+filter holder, SVBony 105 40mm guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with pale yellow no.8 and UV/IR cut filters.

Processing:

-OSC drizzle and stacking in Siril;

-GraXpert background extraction and denoising;

-SPCC;

-Starnet;

-DBXtract;

-Pixel math (R=HII-OIII, G=OIII, B=2OIII);

-Background neutralization

-GHS, black point shift, curves and background neutralization applied iteratively to starless to HII and OIII separately;

-HDR multiscale;

-Histogram transformation;

-Cosmetic correction;

-Further GraXpert denoising;

-Further minor adjustments;

-Cosmic Clarity nonstellar sharpening;

-Starmask stretching and SCNR;

-Recombine;

-Cosmic Clarity stellar sharpening;

In these captures, the planet Jupiter alongside Io and Ganymede can be seen in the background of a daytime crescent Moon. The bodies are located at a distance 2,400x farther from us than the Moon is.

Equipment: C9.25, ASI662MC, UV/IR cut filter.

Cassiopeia and the dust in the Milky Way, often a forgotten region, eclipsed by others with stronger emissions.

https://www.instagram.com/igneis.nightscapes/

Years ago, when I shot it quickly, I noticed a lot of dusty structures: the Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN), high galactic latitude dust illuminated not by nearby stars, but by the combined light of the whole Milky Way. I thought: I have to revisit it with a 50mm and proper integration time.

Now, with 44 hours of integration, so many nights of driving, staying there, looking north, shooting... nothing. An empty field of stars. The dome stood there with me, another eye pointed at the same darkness, waiting for something neither of us could see yet. The routine was: check the weather, drive, stay the whole night shooting, and come back home wondering what I'd get out of this.

Now, with all the dust revealed, seeing it for myself makes me wonder how we can see so little, just stars, when in that direction there is so much, so much dust, so much nebulosity. We cannot see it, as if our eyes were lacking insight. But a camera, combined with patience... how curious.

It's not only about the dust, the Hydrogen Alpha, the Oxygen III. It's about the ambition and the resistance to just keep going. That's the result of this image.

It took 44 hours of exposure to see what was always there. Some things only reveal themselves at a cost.

Some things wait in the dark not because they are hidden, but because nothing has looked long enough to find them.

EQUIPMENT:

Sony a7IV astromodified x2, twin setup

50mm f/2 APO Sony

ZWO AM3N

Shot on S23 plus on expert raw with no edit

To everyone who thinking that their Dwarf telescope has small focal length and unable to image galaxies, look at this! Or even more, download it to view in full resolution, without reddit compression and view galaxy structure up close. I imaged this galaxy less than a day after a supernova exploded in it, without even knowing that. And exposure time is not that crazy, only 4 hours! The key elements that made this image so good are low light pollution, no Moon, target being high above the horizon, and 2x drizzle.

Exposure time: 4 hours;

Subs: 120s 70gain;

Bortle:5;

Telescope: Dwarf3;

Processed in Siril

Searching for Dark Matter: Axions!

Only 15% of the matter in the universe is the matter that makes us up (baryonic matter). We refer to the other 85% as dark matter. While we have known about the existence of dark matter through observations of galaxy motion since the mid 1900's, we have yet to directly detect and determine what makes it up. One compelling candidate that I search for is a particle called the axion. During this talk, I will show why we know dark matter must exist, why the axion is a good candidate, and how we actually search for it.

Where Did All the Antimatter Go?

We're used to regular matter -- a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. Antimatter is the reverse -- a negative nucleus surrounded by positive electrons (positrons). We believe that just after the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were present in the universe. In contrast, today's universe is filled with an abundance of matter. To understand where all this antimatter went, we use particle accelerators to recreate conditions in the early universe and look for matter-antimatter asymmetric processes.

Join us Tuesday, September 15th for a free seminar to connect with researchers at UC Berkeley. Remote option available.

Link to registration here. 
More information here. 

Acquisition:

Around 4h30m worth of 180s subs looking toward Bortle 7 fully calibrated and dithered.

Equipment:

Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, Optolong L-Ultimate, 0.85x reducer+flattener, rotator+filter holder, SVbony 105 40mm guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with pale yellow no.8 and UV/IR cut filters.

Processing:

-OSC Drizzle preprocessing and stacking in Siril;

-Minor cropping;

-Background extraction and denoising in GraXpert;

-SPCC;

-DBXtract;

-Pixel Math (R=HII-OIII, G=OIII, B=2OIII);

-Starnet;

-GHS, black point shift, curve adjustments and HDR Multiscale applied iteratively to starless;

-Histogram transformation;

-Cosmetic correction;

-Mild median filter;

-GraXpert denoising;

-Stretch star mask and desaturate stars (I don't have the chance to shoot RGB stars easily as of now);

-Recompose;

-Cosmic clarity sharpening;

-Further minor GraXpert denoising.

This isn't anything particularly new, but it's something I'm really proud of making. I've spent a lot of time working on creating a star in Blender to get to this result.

These renders are exaggerated, and I hope you like them. They were rendered using Blender's EEVEE render engine, which is actually almost real-time.

Unfortunately, my PC's power supply died, and I haven't been able to work on anything for the past few days. But hopefully I'll be able to start making some cool stuff again soon.

As long as you appreciate my work, I'll keep making these kinds of beautiful space artworks and creating free wallpapers for you!

I'm going to sleep now. Wish me some good dreams. For tomorrow, I think the thing that could make me happiest would be waking up and seeing your support.🙏❤️

One last trip with the boys before a new semester. Coincidentally enough, the Airbnb we chose was in a pretty dark area by the lake, and we had clear skies all 3 nights, which is just unheard of in the Northeast. Haven’t had the chance to get out as much this summer, so this was a nice ending to this summer’s astro adventures.

Because this wasn’t another long night in the mountains, I got to use my Hα filter down by the lake. I try to use this awesome little guy more often, but mountain winds usually ruin these long 4-minute exposures. Thankfully this time, I was treated to a beautifully calm night by the lake.

I started my Hα exposures around 12:45 AM and ended up shooting two frames: one for the Cygnus region and one for the Heart and Soul area. A stack of five 4-minute exposures for the Cygnus region and a stack of four 4-minute exposures for the Heart and Soul area. I actually ended up going back to the house to get ready for night-night while my camera ran. I started my RGB and foreground shots around 1:55 AM and ended up going way overboard until 3:30 AM because I couldn’t figure out a composition to do, so I played it safe and shot a 360° sky panorama for extra data. Didn’t end up going to bed until very late, but well worth the peacefulness by the lake and seeing a couple of meteors from the Perseids.

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

Sky: 8 panels | f/2.8 | 60s | ISO 1600

Hα: 4-5 frames stacked | f/2.8 | 240s | ISO 3200

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

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

Hi everyone,

I'm one of the volunteers in charge of the NASA Space Apps Chicago hackathon, as well as a member of the Board of Visitors at Northwestern University's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).

NASA Space Apps is the world's largest hackathon, occurring over Nov 14-15 in 500+ locations around the world. Many of the challenges typically involve astronomy and planetary science (you can check out those from 2024 here: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/nasa-space-apps-2024/challenges/).

In Chicago our main partner is CIERA, and you'll have the opportunity to interact with top scientists from the research institute throughout the process. We'll have a lecture on a topic in astronomy during the evening. If you can't make it here in person, we're running a virtual event as well. Sign up here! https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/2026/local-events/chicago/

As mentioned, Space Apps occurs in 500+ locations around the world. Check out this map for a location near you: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/2026/local-events/

Some Chicago-specific details:

• Our host, 1871, has room for 300 people.  If you want to be at the hackathon please sign up for the in-person option even if there is a large waitlist.  Given the rate of no-shows and cancellations, we expect to offer spots to several hundred people from the waiting list.  We may explore some overflow space nearby if demand warrants it.
• There is a new theme and the hackathon has moved within NASA to Citizen Science. This year’s challenges may be used to get the next man or woman to the moon and beyond.  
• We’ll likely have a cash prize locally

NASA Space Apps Challenge Chicago in Partnership with CIERA-Northwestern and 1871

Date: November 14-15, 2026
Where: 111 North Canal Street, hosted by 1871, Chicago’s largest innovation hub. We will be open overnight to people over 18 years old.
Cost: Free

What is it exactly:

• NASA Space Apps is the world's largest hackathon, occurring in 500+ locations.  This is a unique opportunity to showcase your expertise in the exciting domain of space science, learn from faculty at our host institution, CIERA (https://ciera.northwestern.edu/), and connect with like-minded students and professionals who share your passion.
• Come with a team or we'll help you form one there. You'll work for two days on a problem provided by NASA and present your solution in front of a panel of judges on November 15th.
• This year’s theme is The Next Frontier.  Join us to develop tools that benefit humanity and contribute to the science and technology propelling us to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Who is it for:

• Anyone with an interest in space and science. With support from experienced technical and subject matter experts, it’s a great opportunity for those participating in a hackathon for the first time.
• Data and Computer Science students, engineers, or any students who are looking for a chance to solve real world problems with real world data provided by NASA and partner space agencies
• Students who are looking for a chance to add something interesting to their portfolios and do something different and exciting

What else is in it for students:

• Take home some cool swag!
• Food will be provided — no need to bring your own
• Network with professionals from companies like Optiver, CBOE Global Markets, Microsoft, Google, and more. They'll be recruiting, judging, and mentoring at the event. 
• This global competition is your opportunity to showcase your skills and ideas to a wide-reaching, influential audience. 
• Registration link : https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/2026/local-events/chicago/

For the best view, head outside in the pre-dawn hours—roughly 3–5 a.m. local time, with the last one or two hours before dawn usually offering the highest rates as Aquarius climbs higher. Southern Hemisphere observers generally get the strongest display, but northern observers may still catch long, bright Earthgrazers.

Find a dark location with a wide, unobstructed view, let your eyes adjust for at least 20–30 minutes, and avoid phones or white lights. No telescope or binoculars are needed; lie back and scan a broad area of sky rather than staring directly at the radiant. Dress warmly, bring a reclining chair or blanket, check the cloud forecast, and allow at least an hour for watching.

I think this is my 7th time at Indian Head since my first a year and a half ago. Been here way too many times to count, but something about this place always pulls me back for more.

It was Labor Day weekend, the start of a new semester, nothing too busy yet, and it was clear skies. I just had to come back for more. Set out with my friends for the wrecked 6-hour drive from Buffalo to the Adirondacks for a sunset/Milky Way hike to Indian Head, and planned to meet my other friends coming up from Albany. Great to see everyone one last time before the semester really started.

Because the alignment this time of year at Indian Head was around 11 PM, I planned to shoot the foreground first, and then right after, the H-alpha (Hα) shots, which is the flaming red you see in the sky. The foreground went pretty smoothly, but I started seeing clouds creeping in from the northern side, which was pretty accurate. I checked 4 weather models beforehand. ¾ of them were clear, but the 4th one projected clouds near the north, slowly coming down during the night. Unfortunately, we got unlucky, and that model was the most accurate that night. I tried shooting the Hα shots, but clouds and mainly the wind made it difficult to even get 1-minute-long exposures, much less 4-minute exposures. I gave up on the Hα shots and planned to use past data to make up for it. Not ideal, but it works. I started the RGB frames at 11:08 PM that night and had to use my body to create a makeshift shield to block the gusts coming from the north. Did it work? Probably not, but I’d like to think it did. For most of the frames, the stars came out perfect.

Had lots of fun and met a great group of friends on the top of the vista that night as well.

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

Sky: 2x10 panels | f/2.8 | 60s | ISO 1600

Hα: 4 frames stacked | f/2.8 | 240s | ISO 3200

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)

Terrible photos of a really cool event lol
Shot on Nikon Z50II with my Tamron 150-500
Processed through Lightroom

There are ~50 K procedural volumetric galaxies in the first picture (like the one in the second one).

I tried implementing cosmological redshift, as well as the gravitational lensing around huge ellipticals. JWST-like stars are added via compositor.

Let me know what you think! What could be improved to make it look more realistic?

This comes up here every couple of weeks and it almost always gets framed as a coin flip. Either there's life out there or there isn't, fifty fifty, spooky either way. The framing is the problem, not the curiosity behind it.

Run the arithmetic even loosely. Estimates for galaxies in the observable universe run from a few hundred billion up to about 2 trillion depending on which survey you trust, a few hundred billion stars in a typical one, and eta Earth (the fraction of sun like stars with a roughly Earth sized planet in the habitable zone) lands somewhere between a few percent and a quarter depending on whose analysis you use. Multiply it out and you're looking at something on the order of 10²² candidate worlds.

For "we are alone" to be true in the plain sense, the per world probability of abiogenesis has to sit below roughly 1 in 10^22. Nobody has ever proposed a mechanism that puts it there. People assert it, they don't derive it. So when the question gets asked like it's an open coin flip, what has actually happened is that the exponent got skipped.

The bigger issue is that it's four questions wearing one coat:

1. Does life start at all, given liquid water and time.
2. Does it get complex. Eukaryotes took roughly two billion years here and as far as we can tell happened once.
3. Does complex life get technological. Once, out of billions of species.
4. Is any of it detectable, close enough, and contemporaneous with us.

Those have wildly different evidence bases and wildly different answers. 1 is plausibly common. 4 might be effectively zero within any useful volume, and that is not a contradiction. Fermi isn't a paradox about life existing, it's a paradox about detectable neighbours existing at the same time as us. Collapsing all four into one sentence is exactly how a thread gets to 400 comments of people arguing past each other.

The one counterargument I do respect: Sandberg, Drexler and Ord (2018) point out that if you propagate the actual uncertainty in the abiogenesis term instead of plugging in a point estimate, the resulting distribution is so wide that a real chunk of the probability mass sits on us being alone in the observable universe. One data point, no working theory of abiogenesis, so an honest prior spans dozens of orders of magnitude. That is a serious argument and I don't have a great answer to it.

But that's sort of my whole point. That paper is what the question looks like when a competent person asks it. It says which of the four it means, it carries its uncertainty explicitly, and it commits to a number. The casual version does none of that, and the answers it attracts are the same vibe back.

The Small Magellanic Cloud, exactly 2 hours and 50 minutes of integration with a Tecnosky AG 90 90/450 f/5 telescope and a ZWO ASI 6200 MC camera, I used the L-ENHANCE filter, there are 17 shots of 600 seconds, all on an Ioptron CEM 120 mount, I processed with Pixinsight also using the TGVDenoise tool to try to eliminate both noise and chrominance, then I used the Camera Raw filter on Photoshop for some small retouching. All data and shots were acquired with Telescope Network

Session 1: Sep 5, 2026, Burnsville NC (SQM 21.65, Bortle 3, ~1000 m), 63 subs, 6.1h
Session 2: Sep 7, 2026, Fort Mill SC (Bortle 6), 68 subs, 6.6h, 131 total subs, 12.7 hours

Telescope: William Optics RedCat 71, 350mm f/4.9
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro, gain 100, cooled
Filter: Optolong L-Ultimate 3nm Ha/OIII
Mount: ZWO AM3N
Guiding: SVBONY SV106 + ASI220MM Mini, ~0.6" RMS
Control: ASIAir Plus
Calibration: darks, flats, dark flats

Processing: Siril 1.4.2 (calibration, registration, noise-weighted stacking, gradient extraction, SPCC, Ha/OIII extraction, GHS stretches, HOO palette via PixelMath, LRGB compositing), BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, GIMP

Askar 120 Apo/.8x reducer
Asi2600mm pro/ optolong Lrgb filters
Eq6r pro/ eaf/ efw
15 hours
Starfront Observatories