u/PimpmyKwad

One month into astrophotography with a €370 Dwarf Mini… and I think I’m officially hooked

Hi everyone!

I’m continuing my journey into the absolutely incredible world of astrophotography, which started about a month ago when I bought a Dwarf Mini.

I posted my first image of the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula here a little while ago, and I was already seriously impressed by what such a tiny telescope could produce.

For that image, I stacked data from 3 nights, roughly 700 frames in total , and did most of the processing with Dwarflab’s Stellar Studio, which honestly already does an amazing job. I only made a few minor adjustments afterward in Lightroom: mostly contrast and a little sharpening.

But then I decided to try some dedicated astrophotography processing software.

I started playing with AstroWizard because it looked pretty beginner-friendly and…

Damn.

I think I’ve just discovered that taking the pictures is only half the battle. 😅

I had no idea how much of the final image quality actually comes from the processing stage. Background extraction, noise reduction, deconvolution, stretching, color work… suddenly I’m realizing there’s an entire second hobby hiding *after* the telescope has finished capturing the data.

So I went back to the exact same 3 nights of data, rebuilt the mega-stack and processed everything again.

And I’m honestly blown away by the difference.

This is the result.

What do you guys think?

I genuinely never expected to be able to produce images like this after only one month in the hobby, especially with a telescope that cost me around €370.

And now I think I’ve officially been bitten by the astrophotography bug.

Because of course, instead of simply enjoying what I already have, I’m now looking at the “next step”:

Dedicated astro camera.

Motorized equatorial mount.

Telescope.

Guiding.

Filters.

Mini PC…

And I’m slowly discovering something else:

If you want to build a setup that gives you the same kind of integrated, almost frictionless experience as these little smart telescopes…

Well… it’s definitely not a €370 setup anymore. 😂

I may have opened a very expensive door.

This little telescope keeps surprising me….. this is my first go at astro (I’ve been shooting for over 30 years, mostly the technical stuff: underwater photography and micro-mineral photography, with fields of view measured in millimetres, using stacking).

I’d always wanted to get into astrophotography, but the pile of new techniques to learn and the price of the gear put me off.

So here’s my attempt at the Bubble Nebula. A few technical details:

**•**	892 subs stacked into one megastack over four nights (maybe a bit overkill… but the more the better!!)  
**•**	equatorial mount, 90 second subs, gain 50

For anyone who hasn’t tried a multi-night megastack yet, honestly, it’s a game changer, especially for image quality 😉

I will post the result of one night of stacking, then four nights of stacking, both raw and unedited, so you can see the difference for yourselves!

Final version: Stellar Studio + Lightroom

I haven’t tried reprocessing the stacks in dedicated astro software like PixInsight or AstroWizard yet. That’s the next step, we’ll see if it beats what I’m getting out of Stellar Studio.