I can't believe I managed to resolve Jupiter's red spot with only 4 inches of aperture!
The image is an extreme crop into my lunar mosaic with separately stacked Jupiter sequences painted in before egress and with egress in-progress.
I hope you like them!
Gear: ZWO FF107 APO, ZWO ASI715C planetary camera, Celestron CGX mount
Software: SharpCap 4.1, Autostakkert!4, AstroSurface, Pixinsight, Affinity Photo 2, DarkTable
I can't believe I managed to resolve Jupiter's red spot with only 4 inches of aperture!
The first image is an extreme crop into my lunar mosaic with separately stacked Jupiter sequences painted in before egress and with egress in-progress.
I hope you like them!
Gear: ZWO FF107 APO, ZWO ASI715C planetary camera, Celestron CGX mount
Software: SharpCap 4.1, Autostakkert!4, AstroSurface, Pixinsight, Affinity Photo 2, DarkTable
A moonset in a rural county in Eastern Ontario. Saturday 26th, 5.40am local time.
There's this house on a hill with beautiful rolling views I always admire and when I checked the position of the moon in the sky this was the perfect opportunity to create nightscape worthy of the location and its view.
This is a composite of 5 shots
- a single shot for the background f/5.6 ISO800 6 seconds @ 250mm focal length
- four shots of the moon each with f/5.6 ISO 800 1/640th of a second 250mm focal length
Hope you like this little tribute to local rural life.
Keep looking up,
Oleg // The Rural Photons
AstroBin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/64lwpn
Hello friends! I have something rather special prepared for today - Messier 33, better known as Triangulum Galaxy! This one of our nearest galactic neighbours at about 2.7 million light-years away. It’s the third-largest major galaxy in our Local Group after Andromeda and the Milky Way, and is about 60,000 light-years across.
It’s smaller than both of them, but it’s also ridiculously active. Its spiral arms are full of regions where new stars are forming inside huge clouds of hydrogen, and that makes it a particularly interesting target once you start adding narrowband data.
The brightest of those regions is NGC 604, which you can see as the very bright pink patch in the upper-right part of the galaxy. It is one of the largest star-forming regions in the Local Group.
So naturally, after spending 9 hours shooting M33 in LRGB and getting an image I was quite happy with I decided that what it really needed was another night of collecting hydrogen alpha emission data.
So I added 3+ hours of H-alpha.
Triangulum is absolutely littered with regions where new stars are being formed. H-alpha picks up the light emitted by ionized hydrogen around those young, hot stars, and suddenly a whole collection of pink clouds starts appearing throughout the spiral arms.
What surprised me most was how much the character of the galaxy changed. I already had plenty of colour and structure in the 9-hour broadband version, but the hydrogen data shows where a lot of the active star formation is actually happening.
About 12 hours of photons in the final version, from a galaxy roughly 2.7 million light-years away.
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Technical details
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Acquisition: ZWO FF107 4 inch refractor, IMX571 ToupTek monochrome camera, Optolong LRGB filters, Optolong H-alpha 3nm filter
Stacked and processed in Pixinsight, roughly following the LRGB first, continuum-subtracted Ha later approach
What do you do when you’re quietly minding your own business one evening and a friend messages:
“Hey, want to drive an hour to a private railway? The Milky Way will be in just the right position… about two hours from now.”
You drop everything, grab your gear, and go!
After only 30 minutes on location—and another seven hours of post-processing—I came away with this view of the Milky Way rising beyond the railroad tracks. Some adventures are simply great done spontaneously.
Thank you Bruce for the impromptu outing!
Even though I had to shoot the sky separately to get more Milky Way data this is the true framing of the scene that night, this is why it was simple to combine the enhanced Milky Way sky back into the original frame, as everything was there already.
TRACKED, STACKED, BLENDED // Vankleek Hill area, Ontario, Canada
Technical detail:
Ground: 3 shots stacked, 30s, f/2.8, ISO3200, 14mm Rokinon lens, Canon RP
Sky: 14 shots stacked, MSM Nomad star tracker, 30s, f/2.8, ISO3200, 14mm Rokinon lens, Canon RP
I didn't even know I had captured SN 2025rbs last year, but I did.
When I heard about SN 2026aaiv this month I had to give it a go as well.
Both datasets gathered with the same imaging train:
4'' refractor ZWO 107FF
QHY268M mono camera
Optolong LRGB filters
Celestron CGX mount.
Both stacked and processed in Pixinsight
What an absolute treasure of a find tonight was - a vintage very early 20th century McCormick-Deering tractor basking in the glory of the Milky Way, graciously put on a field by a loving 3rd generation owner.
Thank you to my photo friends for the arrangements and the jolly company as per our usual -- thoroughly enjoyed myself last night. The Milky Way shone strongly and clearly as well.
EXIF:
Sky 22x30s, f/3.2, ISO3200 14mm
Ground 30s, f/3.2 ISO3200 14mm
South Stormont, Ontario, Canada
Last night was perfect for Milky Way photography! I scoped out a few places while the Sun was still out and settled on a lone tree amidst the farmer's field just out of North Lancaster, ON, Canada.
Making these kinds of images is a combination of planning, patience and perseverance - the night sky has seasons, is always moving, and you really don't want the Moon to be up, as it washes out the colours and the structure of the Milky Way.
This image has been created using my usual technique that works best for my setup - taking two sets of images - one for the foreground, and one for the sky, just behind the subject, then combining and enhancing them. (30s x5 for the ground, 30s x 40 for the sky, on a star tracker, f/4 24mm ISO1600)
I hope you enjoy this one. Keep looking up.
All the best,
Oleg
P.S. if you're ever on Facebook and want to see more of this type of thing my corner is here https://facebook.com/the.rural.photons
The Heart Nebula is usually framed tightly around the bright, familiar shape of IC 1805. For this image I wanted to pull back a little and show more of what surrounds it -- the much fainter emission that seems to spill away from the main nebula and disappear into the background.
This is a two-panel narrowband mosaic, with both panels captured through Askar’s D1 and D2 filters and combined into an SHO-style palette. The acquisition was the easy part compared with the processing: assembling the mosaic, balancing two panels, separating and recombining the different emission structures, controlling the stars, and trying to bring out the faint outer material without making the whole thing look forced ended up consuming most of a day in PixInsight.
What I like most about the result is that the Heart itself almost becomes only part of the story in the frame. The bright central structures draw the eye first, but there is an enormous amount of dim, tangled nebulosity extending beyond them.
Hence the title: The Heart and its Sleeve.
As always, best viewed full-size... there is considerably more hiding in the darker parts of the frame than first appears.
Hi fellow Dwarfers (and future Dracos) - I'd like to share with you my late summer project 17h with Astro filter and 13h with Duo-band filter on Andromeda, taken in rural South Glengarry, Ontario, Canada @ Bortle 4.5
17h is a megastack done inside the device, and 13h is a restack in Siril using Nazstronomy's script.
Processed in Pixinsight.
Clear skies!
The Ghostly Dust of the Iris Nebula (NGC 7023) ✨
I've been sitting on this project for a while, because I had trouble tastefully processing this incredibly complex dusty region, with a stunning reflection nebula about 1,300 light-years away. While the stars are beautiful, I think it looks absolutely mesmerizing when they are removed.
Flip through the images to see how removing the starfield completely reveals the massive, dark cosmic dust lanes hiding in the background!
20 hours of data was gathered throughout short, short summer nights at my backyard observatory in Bortle 4.5 skies. Sharpstar 13028HNT hyperbolic newtonian at f/2.8
Which version do you prefer? 🔍
Better details image here: https://app.astrobin.com/i/pau097?r=0#fullscreen
Thank you everyone for the feedback on my earlier post where I was comparing background extracted/autostretched data vs processed data that used BX ML5 as part of the process. Many of you pointed that was apples to oranges.
This time I've applied the same steps to the BX ML4 image on the left and BX ML5 image on the right - that is the only difference. The difference of course become subtle, but I'd maintain it is visible.
Happy to hear your thoughts on this comparison, and apologies again on the previous comparison
Edit: it seems like you might not see much of a difference unless you download the image and open it separately, at least on mobile devices
Jumping in on the latest version of BlurXterminator (ML5) bandwagon. I have 2.5h of first light data from my then-uncollimated hyperbolic newtonian (sharpstar 13028NHT).
Here is the heavily cropped and zoomed in result (200% zoom). On the left - BG extraction and auto stretch, on the right BlurX and other pretty standard processing (NoiseX, Multiscale adaptive stretch, GHS, star reduction)
Clouds moved out for the whole duration!
Shot on ZWO FF107 4" refractor with QHY268M camera in SharCap with live planetary stacking and a timelapse function in there.
Incredibly lucky that the clouds moved out last night and I was able to capture the whole thing! It's on 4" refractor and mono camera, so no colour, unfortunately!
South Glengarry Ontario Canada
A composite image of a cupola of the church located in Bainsville, ON, Canada and our biggest two closest galaxies.
Foreground was a single shot with 8s, 50mm focal length @ f/1.8, ISO1600
M31 and M33 are pre stacked and processed, then painted into the foreground shot.
M31 details: 9h of RGB and 3h of Ha data
M33 details: 6h of RGB and 3h of Ha data
Both stacked and processed in Pixinsight
A rare clear sky yesterday in Glengarry, Ontario, Canada - Moon was down by 11pm and we had 90 minutes of MW core still visible.
This is a composite of foreground shot and 75x10s stacked MW sky taken right from behind this building.
Foreground: 30s f/4 ISO1600 24mm
Sky: 75x10s f/4 ISO1600 24mm
Blended in Affinity photo 2
Hey folks, as usual, I've stared at this long enough to lose all sense of what looks good or no, so I'm stepping away from processing and posting the latest attempt I have on hand.
This is the Squid, the Bat, and the Seahorse, all crammed together with 360mm focal length and IMX571 sensor. The scope I used was Sharpstar 13028HNT that has a whooping f/2.8 OSC with Askar D1 Ha/Oiii filter for narrowband at about 9h of integration, and IDAS light pollution filter for RGB at about 12h. As many of you might know the squid is extremely elusive/faint target in Oiii spectrum, generally people spend upwards of 20h on it to get the details out. I didn't gather data for that long so mine are fuzzy and artificially boosted to be in balance with other stuff.
The most challenging part was to stretch the dust without degrading the combination of RGB and continuum subtracted data for the Bat and the Squid. The thing that made me re-do the whole process a number of times was the background extraction process. Initial attempts with StiAstro's ADBE and GraXpert AI were as it turned out later too aggressive in weird places, so a friend of mine strongly suggested I go back to basic manual point DBE, which seems to have helped. I experimented with SetiAstro's ADBE settings later on (untick simple modelling checkbox, increase point amount from 50 to 150 and sensitivity to 1.7) and it seems to have yielded good consistent correction.
Anyway, stacked and processed in Pixinsight with later mucking about with layers for stars and starless in Affinity Photo 2 plus finishing touches in Darktable.
Got this data July 30th - 3h 40minutes total
Askar D1 and D2 filters, Sharpstar 13028HNT and Touptek 2600C
More details in AstroBin: https://app.astrobin.com/i/trmotf
Stacked and processed in PI. ADBE on both, star correction, sharpening, extract S/H/O channels, recombine into color using SetiAstro's perfect palette picker (dynamic inverse)
Do you think it's Foolish to image at full moon?