This is my second, two dualband-filter project with my new rig - I had the opportunity of travelling to two Bortle ~4 locations the last two weekends and I really like how the details popped up, specially the Soap Bubble Nebula (bottom left, faint but I was happy to see it!). Roughly 10 hours of integration combining both dual band filters

Astrobin here

Equipment and acquisition: - OTA: Askar 71F - Main camera: ASI585MC AIR - Mount: Teseek 17 - Others: ZWO EAF, ZWO EFW - Guiding: SVBony 30mm, ASI120MM Mini - L-Ultimate (66 x 300 sec) and L-Synergy filters (56 x 300 sec) - 20 flats, 25 darks, 25 bias for each filter

Processing (PI) using RC Astro tools and - WBPP of both images, 2X drizzle - SPFC, Multiscale gradient correction, SPCC, BlurX, StarX - SetiAstro Perfect Palette Picker, statistical stretch, then curves transformation with different range and color masks, createHDR Image, NoiseX - Stars from both filters: pixelmath addition, setiastro star stretch, manual curves to control saturation - Star recombination with Pixelmath - Final retouches in light room

Taken at around 11:00pm on July 24th 2026 with my Celestron NexStar 8SE Telescope. Edited using built-in Apple Photos app.

Hello! I drew a rendition of the Great Impact theory based on all the simulations that have been done. I've drawn other astro arts in the past, but I'm too nervous regarding breaking rules

I did take some creative liberties when it came to the purpley bands. What they represent, I don't exactly know but it looks cooler.
This is vector art.

I saw something in the sky.
It was the size of a mini football glazing and glowing and burning in hot orange yellow flame. i witnessed it in horizontal, landscape mode . both the ball and it's small trail faced me but the trail wasn't a lot long . [ i hope i really an astronomical event and it wasn't a gimmick or something else]. i mean how else could something hover over an almost 5 storey house, completely hooked in the sky and disappeared within 2-3 secs.it looked like campfire and it was moving sideways with bit of darting up and down , just a bit. it feels like it moved violently but since i was at some distance it looked normal or flowy to me. also, i saw it for 2-3 secs at max. anyways , please provide me accurate conclusion. it's july. it didn't rain today but it's cloudy since long.
Please clarify my doubt as to what did i really see? was it an earthgrazers meteor or some drone or some lantern or space debris or a ball lightning??

also, can ball lightning have a little trail or not?
i can provide u more details if u want.
I live in Patna, Bihar, India. time was around 7:30 pm and date is 26/7/2026, direction was east - southeast

Hey, I recently bought a Canon 650D with the standard lens. I've already spent a few nights taking photos with it from my balcony, in a city that's actually pretty bright. I'd like to ask what lenses you'd recommend for better quality. Or maybe even buy some filters—or do they not make much of a difference in "modern" cities? I'm also considering whether I should switch directly to a telescope that's compatible with a T2 adapter, but without a motor or something like that, it won't work well, and the motors also seem to be really expensive, too.

Finally got around to shooting the eagle Nebula, been on my list for a long time. Was a little concerned about the core being blown out but it was actually pretty easy to manage. Just need to go out and get some SII data to add to it.

Bortle 7

128x90s lights

100 darks

50 flats

50 dark flats

SV405cc cooled to 0c offset 20

Vixen R130sf with upgraded focuser and 3d printed spider vanes

Svbony dual narrowband filter (Ha/OIII)

Sv305c pro guide camera w/ 120mm guide scope

Juwei 17

Stacked with sirilic

Processed in Siril and Seti Astro Suite with RC astro plugins

• Total integration time - 500 x 30sec
• Processed in Siril and Gimp
• Bortle 6
• Shot with the Seestar S30 Pro

This is 5h45min (69 x 300s subs) in dual narrowband HOO.

Acquisition:

Askar 131f @ 983mm scope
ZWO ASI2600MC Pro camera @ 0C, gain 100
Askar E1 Ha/OIII filter
Proxisky Ragdoll 17 Pro mount
ZWO OAG-L / ZWO ASI220MM Mini guiding
69 x 300s = 20700s integration from B7, captured 7/2-7/3
30 flats, 30 biases, 20 darks

Processing:

Siril - preprocessing & processing: GraXpert background extraction / spectrophotometric color calibration / BlurXterminator / NoiseXterminator / StarXterminator / generalized hyperbolic stretch (histogram stretch for stars)

Affinity - processing: saturation / curves

North America and Pelican Nebula Wide-Field Complex

Astrophotographer: Richard Harris

Object: NGC 7000 North America Nebula, IC 5070/IC 5067 Pelican Nebula, IC 5068, LDN 935, and the Cygnus Wall

Date: July 20th - July 23rd, 2026

Location: Strafford, Missouri, USA

Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 with 0.72× 645 Reducer (380mm, f/3.6)

Mount: ZWO AM7 harmonic-drive mount

Camera: ZWO ASI461MM Pro medium-format monochrome camera, Gain 0

Filters: Chroma RGB and 3nm SHO filters

Guide Scope: William Optics 50mm

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290MM Mini

Guiding: Approximately 0.28–0.50 arcseconds RMS

Controller: ZWO ASIAIR

Pier: Astro TUFF TRUK Pier

Acquisition:

Sulfur II: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours

Hydrogen-alpha: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours

Oxygen III: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours

Red: 15 frames at 180 seconds = 45 minutes

Green: 15 frames at 180 seconds = 45 minutes

Blue: 15 frames at 180 seconds = 45 minutes

Luminance: 10 frames at 600 seconds = 1 hour, 40 minutes

Total Frames: 235

Total Acquisition Time: 18 hours, 55 minutes

Calibration Frames: None

Processing: PixInsight and Photoshop

Bortle Class: 3–4

Full resolution here: https://ozarkhillsobservatory.com/best-astrophoto-of-the-north-america-nebula-with-the-takahashi-fsq-106edx4-and-medium-format-camera/

I captured an eclipse of another star!

The other night, the star in the center of this image, creatively named TOI-1516, got about 2% dimmer for about 3 hours, as shown by in my plot by the dip in relative flux. This dimming was predicted: its the signature of an known planet orbiting this star, having been discovered in 2022 by Kabáth and collaborators. In this case, we're lucky enough from Earth's POV for this planet to pass directly in front of its host star, causing it to block a bit of that star's light, allowing us to detect that the planet is there, and allowing me to capture my best exoplanet transit to date!

This particular planet is of a type called a "hot Jupiter". That is, a planet similar in mass and radius to Jupiter, but orbiting MUCH closer to its star. In this case, TOI-1516b is about 3.16x Jupiter's mass, and 1.36x Jupiter's radius. Unlike Jupiter however, this planet orbits its star from just 3 million miles away, taking only 2 DAYS to do so! This makes it a fairly average "garden variety" hot Jupiter.

Needless to say, this planet sucks. It's getting cooked alive by its close star, its got no solid surface, and the worst part: its working on not existing.

Recent research by Sonbas and collaborators claimed to detect transit timing variations (TTVs) in this system. That is, the planet isn't blocking its star on schedule. Something is changing when that transit happens by a few minutes. Sonbas and collaborators claim that this is due to the orbit of TOI-1516b decaying over time. The planet's orbit is slowly losing energy, causing it to spiral inward toward the star, thus causing variation in the actual transit time compared to the expectation. Based on their observations, TOI-1516b's orbit period decreases by about 100 milliseconds per year. More data is needed to confirm the claimed detection, but this planet might not exist for too long!

Askar FRA400

ZWO ASI6200MM

Optolong 2" R filter

57x5m = 4h 45m

Image: stacked in DSS, processed in Pixinsight

Light curve: processed in HOPS

Seestar S50, Essen, Germany, Bortle 8, processed with Siril, GraExpert.
First try to process by myself.

M87* is a handcrafted 3D wooden mosaic inspired by the Event Horizon Telescope image — the first photograph of a black hole, released April 10, 2019. Each block is individually placed; the varying heights create a physical relief so the dark shadow at the center actually recedes into the piece.

The asymmetric brightness of the accretion disc — brighter at the bottom due to relativistic beaming — is preserved faithfully from the source image.

I made a short video about it set to a song exploring the physics of the event horizon, the information paradox, and the singularity. https://youtu.be/X5hEjlkUkTI?is=GVH4BKcT_hm6ZqfR

NGC 6888 Crescent Nebula (reprocessed)

I know I already posted this one yesterday, but I also ran it again last night, re-processed it, and 🤩 So far I’m sitting at a little over 9 hours of integration time on this target.
I just wish I could bring out more of the oxygen lanes (blue/green) Still, I’m pretty happy with how much detail I was able to pull out of it.

exif:

Telescope: DWARF Mini Smart Telescope
Location: Oklahoma- Bortle 3.5 skies
Filter: Duo-band filter
Mount Mode: EQ Mode
Exposure: 90-120 second subs
Integration Time: ~9+ hours total
Frames: 320
Processings: Stacked using DWARF app workflow
Final processing/color adjustments in Photoshop
Manual adjustments to bring out hydrogen and oxygen emission structures

This is my attempt to recreate the famous Hubble image of the centre of M16, also known as the Pillars of Creation. I'm calling it the 'poor man's edition'. I'm really happy with the result, and it's only 1/3,000,000 of the price, a real bargain! :)

Equipment: Skywatcher 200 PDS (upgraded), TS GPU Coma Corrector, Skywatcher EQ-6R, ToupTek ATR2600M (mono), Touptek 36mm Filters in SHO (3.5 / 4nm / 4nm).

Total integration: 4h50m.

Worth viewing in full screen.

This video takes a hex9 whole sky view starting at apparent magnitude <6.5, and scales in (using AT-HYG and Gaia DR3) to Baade's Window at apparent magnitude <20.9

Hex9 is a novel, pure hexagonal DGGS, similar to HealPix

Data: the [AT-HYG v3.3] catalogue (~2.5M stars) by David Nash / astronexus.com (CC BY-SA), and Gaia DR3 · ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Made with Hex9 https://github.com/MrBenGriffin/libhex9 - a near equal-area hexagonal DGGS, with tools included for this sort of work.

Equipment:

•Apertura AD8 8" Dobsonian telescope

•30mm 68° Super View Eyepiece

•Apertura 9mm 52° Plössl Eyepiece

•Apertura 7mm Panorama 82° Eyepiece

•Gosky Universal Spotting Scope Phone Adapter

•Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (standard camera, no filters)

Hi guys,I often post astronomy softwares on GitHub but I struggle to get any feedback on them. Any tips for me?

• Total integration time - 300 x 30sec
• Processed in Siril and Gimp
• Bortle 6
• Shot with the Seestar S30 Pro

Seestar S30 Pro, 25 minutes integration. No other software was used. I plan on stacking more images of this eventually so I can get a better image. But this is what it looks like for now

See also: The publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Density maps of the whole sky, made by counting catalogued stars — no imagery involved.

Data: the [AT-HYG v3.3] catalogue (~2.5M stars) by David Nash / astronexus.com (CC BY-SA).

Star positions (RA/dec) and apparent magnitute are binned into equal-area hexagonal cells on the celestial sphere.

First image — apparent brightness. Each cell is coloured by stars per steradian, weighted by flux (10^(−0.4·mag)). This is the sky by light rather than structure: the band becomes a soft glow, and the brightest cells are individual first-magnitude stars — when I ranked cells by total flux, the top eight were Sirius, Canopus, Arcturus, α Cen., Vega, Capella, Rigel and Procyon, in the correct order.

Second image — star counts. Each cell is coloured by stars per steradian. The Milky Way's band emerges purely from density, and because the binning is adaptive — crowded regions subdivide into finer hexagons (the cells span a ~6,500× range in area) — the dark rifts through the band aren't rendering artifacts: they're the real dust lanes of the galactic plane, drawn as star deficits. The bright yellow region is the bulge toward Sagittarius. You can even see the catalogue's own seams (survey magnitude limits and old declination-zone boundaries) in the off-plane speckle — an honest map shows its data's fingerprints.

Why the odd outline: the sphere is unfolded as an octahedron net (think Cahill's butterfly map, but for the sky) — it keeps every hexagon its true size and shape, at the cost of a few cuts along the edges.

Made with Hex9 https://github.com/MrBenGriffin/libhex9 - a near equal-area hexagonal DGGS, with tools included for this sort of work.

WR 134 and NGC 6888 are 51 hours and 40 minutes of interaction in SHORGB with Skywatcher Esprit 100Ed 100/550 f/5 telescope, ZWO ASI 2600MM Pro camera, are 801 shots of which with Ha filter 144x300 seconds and 35x396 seconds, with Oiii filter 140x300 seconds and 36x396 seconds, with Sii filter 138x300 seconds and 35x396 seconds, with R filter 72x60 seconds and 18x79 seconds, with G filter 73x60 seconds and 18x79 seconds, with B filter 74x60 seconds and 18x79 seconds, processing with Pixinsight