Yippie my comment never posted from last night! here’s the writeup:

Decided to give this one a reshoot under darker skies. My shot of it from 2019 had a lot more light pollution and less exposure time than this pic. M46 also has a small planetary nebula, NGC 2438, in the cluster. Captured on November 23rd, 2025 from a bortle 3 zone (Deerlick Astronomy village)

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 1h 14m minutes (Camera at -15°C)

• L - 20x90"

• R - 10x90"

• G - 10x90"

• B - 9x90"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

linear:

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

$T * med(model) / model

• BlurXterminator (correct only)

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• HSV Repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch L and RGB images nonlinear nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost for the RGB image

Nonlinear processing:

• LRGBCombination with stretched L image as luminance

• DeepSNR noise reduction

• Lots of curve transformations

• Slight SCNR to remove greens from some stars

• more curves

• Resample to 65%

• Annotation

Bad Romance by Lady Gaga. Idc if I’m a man in his late 20’s I’m putting my heart and soul into it

Doesn’t seem to, they announced this a couple months ago

Anki is great! Half my med school class uses it

100% true. Can’t also forget about nearly everyone getting cataracts by the time they’re in their 60’s!

See this is why I will randomly delete half of my DSO exposures before stacking. Don’t want unlucky data ruining the final image /s

I had like 5 seconds of panic because there was a gray spot in my vision after I accidentally looked at a baileys bead completely unfiltered through my telescope the second the eclipse ended. Turns out I just had a smudge on my glasses :P

It actually looks like it’s namesake!

This is a combo of SHO hubble palette + true color RGB for the stars. Captured in October 2025 from a Bortle 9 zone.

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 49 hours 56 minutes (Camera at -15°C)

• Ha - 63x600"

• Oiii - 122x600"

• Sii - 102x600"

• R - 63x60"

• G - 63x60"

• B - 63x60"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

Narrowband linear:

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection using MARS project data (had to do good ol fashioned DBE for the Sii channel)

• BlurXterminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection (this is some seriously impressive shit!)

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• BlurX (correct only mode)

• HSV Repair

• StarX to extract a stars only image

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost

Nonlinear processing:

• Pixelmath to combine stretched narrowband images into color image (SHO/Hubble palette)

• SCNR > Invert > SCNR > Invert to remove some greens and magentas

• DeepSNR

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

• HistogramTransformation to further stretch the red channel a little

• more curves

• NoiseX for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched RGB stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• Slight SCNR

• Resample to 65%

• Annotation

I totally didn’t procrastinate processing this thing, and it’s just pure coincidence that I finally took a stab at it in October…

In hindsight, this really could’ve used another night of data (particularly the L), but I only had one clear night at the dark site. I was just happy to get out of the light pollution and shoot a dark nebula for once! Captured on August 17th, 2025 from a bortle 3 zone (deerlick astronomy village).

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 7 hours 21 minutes (Camera at -15°C), half unity gain

• L - 56x180"

• R - 30x180"

• G - 30x180"

• B - 31x180"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

For the L channel I did 3 stacks each with 1/3rd of the data, then combined them to an RGB image (was still grayscale) to use deepSNR noise reduction. after this it was properly converted to mono

• Dynamic Crop

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection

  First time trying out the MARS thing in pixinsight. It seems to work very well

Luminance Linear:

• BlurXterminator

• Stars removed with starx

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• ChannelCombination to combine monochrome R G and B images in to single color image

• MultiscaleGradient Correction

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• BlurXterminator (correct stars only)

• HSV Repair

• Extracted stars with starXterminator, to be used later for independent starless processing

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight saturation curve boost

** Stars only processing:**

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight SCNR to remove greens and magentas

• Curves to boost saturation

Nonlinear Processing:

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Several rounds of curve adjustments for lightness, contrast, saturation, color balance, with various masks

• LocalHistogramEqualization

• More curves

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched RGB stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• BlurX to sharpen the stars a little

• Even more curves

• Slight SCNR

• Resample to 70%

• Tighter crop in on just the nebula

• Annotation

Yep! It helps people give good feedback on images, and can help serve as a guide for newer people to the hobby

Are you moving the mount in just one axis? Or doing both RA and DEC movements at the same time? You might also want to dither more frequently, especially with how many 30” subs you can get in a half hour. Even that amount of walking noise will add up

Pretty good for a phone! I’m guessing it’s doing some kind of stacking process? I think there would be some streaking with a single 4 min exposure, but your stars look nice and sharp

Opossums have 13 nipples

Head empty no thoughts