Some places are worth visiting even at night. I photographed this one in nearby open air archaeological museum. Hope you'll agree.

Shot on Sony a7RV, Viltrox 27mm f1.2 Pro and with help of Syrp Genie Mini II pan&tilt kit. Edited in PTGui, Siril, PS and LR. Exposure info - 20 frame panorama, each at 10s, f1.2 and ISO 1600.

Here are two posters I created to show the relative apparent size of famous DSOs

All images in the two posters have been captured using the following setup:
Mount: IOptron SkyGuider Pro
Camera: Nikon D5300 astromod
OTA: William Optics Zenithstar 61II + Field Flattener FLAT61A
Focal/Aperture: 360 mm @ f/5.9
Guide scope: William Optics Uniguide 32mm
Guide camera: ZWO ASI120MM mini + ASIair Pro

All images have been calibrated, stacked, and processed in PixInsight. Blending of all the images and posters creation done in GIMP.

Dumbbell nebula :)

Spent quite some time on it, collecting hydrogen alpha when the moon was not allowing for anything else

36.5 hours Halpha, 3nm Antlia filter

19 hours OIII, 12nm Astronomik filter

Romania, Bortle 4.5

Processed in Pixinsight, Seti Astro suite, GraXpert, Photoshop.

IMX 533 mono, -15°

Newton 200/1200

EQ6R

9.2 hours total integration on the Elephant Trunk Nebula Imaged 14 & 19 April, 2026 in Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire, UK

High resolution image and full integration details on Astrobin.

Well, I wanted to show you my latest renders before I sleep. I made this black hole without following any tutorials. I tried to create a black hole that looks beautiful, and at the same time doesn't disappoint astronomy fans too much :))

Hope you'll like it.

Wings of the Dumbell nebula is a very dimm structure compared to bright core, that I almost overexposed by pushing the gain up to 150

Telescope: Dwarf 3;

Exposure: 5 hours;

Subs: 60s 150gain;

Duo band filter;

Processed in Siril;

Bortle 5;

Compressed for reddit

Here's the Messier Catalog I completed in 2024

This poster presents all 110 Messier objects for a total of 178 hours of total integration, with an average of 2h15 / target.

I've also created an interactive PDF version of this poster with pop-up descriptions of each object as you mouse-over the images: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GSopNt4JMNElVlxXRyDobjgOU0Ze1Q0V/view?usp=sharing

All images have been captured with the following equipment:
Mount: IOptron SkyGuider Pro
Camera: Nikon D5300 astromod
OTA: William Optics Zenithstar 61II + Field Flattener FLAT61A
Focal/Aperture: 360 mm @ f/5.9
Guide scope: William Optics Uniguide 32mm
Guide camera: ZWO ASI120MM mini + ASIair Pro

All images have been stacked and processed in PixInsight. The Poster was done in LibreOffice Impress.

​

My latest image of the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146, surrounded by the huge amount of dark interstellar dust running through this part of Cygnus.

I wanted to capture more than just the bright Cocoon itself, so the processing was aimed at bringing out the much fainter dusty structure and dark nebula surrounding it while still retaining the dense background star field.

**Equipment**

• Askar 107PHQ + 0.7× reducer (~524mm, f/4.9)

• ZWO ASI2600 Duo

• Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro

• Optolong L-eNhance

• UV/IR-cut filter

• PHD2 guiding

**Light frames**

• UV/IR: 29 × 120s = 58 minutes

• L-eNhance: 46 × 240s = 3h 04m

• Total light integration: **4h 02m**

**Calibration**

• 30 × 120s darks for the UV/IR data

• 30 × 240s darks for the L-eNhance data

• 50 flats per filter

• 50 dark-flats per filter

The UV/IR and L-eNhance data were calibrated and stacked separately. The broadband UV/IR data provided most of the natural star field and faint dusty structure, while the L-eNhance data was used to strengthen the Hα/OIII emission from the Cocoon.

Processing involved gradient/background correction, noise reduction, separate star and starless processing, stretching and then combining the two filter datasets. A fair bit of care was needed with the stretch because pushing the background too far very quickly makes the faint dust overly contrasty.

The part I particularly like is the dark nebula itself. The Cocoon is obviously the bright centrepiece, but once the surrounding dust starts appearing you realise just how much structure there is across the entire field.

**IC 5146 – Cocoon Nebula, Cygnus**

**Total integration: 4h 02m**

NGC 6193, 2 hours and 50 minutes of integration with a Tecnosky AG90 90/450 f/5 telescope, ZWO ASI 6200MC camera, L-ENHANCE filter, there are 17 shots of 600 seconds each, I processed with Pixinsight trying to extract as much signal as possible and zoomed in on this nebula, I then continued with Photoshop using the Camera Raw filter to eliminate the haze. All data and shots were acquired with Telescope Network

This is a full-Sun mosaic from NASA's IRIS spacecraft, taken in the Si IV 1394 Å line on 2014 May 12, near the peak of solar cycle 24.

It isn't a photograph. IRIS is a slit spectrograph, so the image was assembled from 1002 separate raster steps and took roughly 17 hours to complete, from 09:53 UT on May 12 to 03:17 UT the next morning. Every pixel holds a full spectrum, 41 wavelength samples across the line.

The 80,000 K in the title is where Si IV forms: the transition region, the remarkably thin layer separating the 6,000 K chromosphere from the million-degree corona above it.

The color encodes each pixel's spectrum rather than being an aesthetic choice. I ran every line profile through CIE color matching, so hue is Doppler shift across ±75 km/s, with blue moving toward us and red moving away, and lightness is intensity. Green means the plasma is essentially at rest along our line of sight. None of this is visible to the eye. Si IV sits at 139 nm in the far ultraviolet, so any color here is a deliberate mapping.

The speckled patch near disk center is the South Atlantic Anomaly. It's the region where Earth's inner radiation belt dips closest to the surface, and spacecraft passing through get showered with energetic particles that strike the detector directly. IRIS crosses it about once per orbit, so over a 17-hour mosaic a few blocks of raster steps come back buried in particle hits. Those blocks are left in rather than painted over. The short black bars are dropped raster steps.

Data: NASA/LMSAL IRIS, publicly available here. Processed in Python with astropy, named-arrays, colorsynth for the spectrum-to-color mapping, and astroscrappy to remove cosmic-ray hits.

I know this may seem like a trivial question, but I've been searching for a Voyager pulsar map in .svg format in google or other sides for my own use for a long time, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

I wanted to ask if anyone has it, or a program or code to generate this map in .svg format.

With all due respect for you all

Yesterday I visited the Archenhold Observatory in Berlin, built in 1896 with 250000 German gold marks in private donations to Friedrich Simon Archenhold’s crowdfunding project as a public telescope for the Berlin Trade Fair. That’s $2.5 million in today’s USD! It is still the longest refractor telescope, at 21 m with a 68 cm lens, and most likely the fastest to rotate. Its still-original electromechanics let it rotate around the observer, who stays in the center—much different from common constructions, where you have to move around with a ladder. Unfortunately, a microcrack was recently noticed, and currently it can’t be rotated. The surrounding building was added in 1909 and is famous for being the location of Albert Einstein’s first public lecture on the theory of general relativity on June 2, 1915.

More about its history: https://www.planetarium.berlin/en/archenhold-observatory/history and https://astw.de/astronomiegeschichte/anfaenge_riesenfernrohr.php

Taken between 10-13th August 2026 in Argenteuil, France. 212x 300s frames for a total of 17h40. That was a very difficult target for me, as it was the first multiple nights imaging I tried and I hoped to get a reasonably good view of the Bubble nebula. It's a very faint planetary nebula with another brighter nebula in the background. It's so hard to see that it was only discovered by an amateur astronomer in 2007! In the end my Bortle 7 sky did its thing, but you can actually see it if you know where to look (check Astrobin to get the full resolution image, it's actually to the bottom left of the Crescent nebula).

Telescope: William Optics Redcat 51

Mount: ZWO AM5N

Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC, Gain 100

Filter wheel: ZWO EFW 5x50

Autofocuser: ZWO EAF

Filter: Optolong L-enHance

Guide Scope: ZWO 30mm Mini

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI120MM Mini

Controller: ZWO ASIAIR Plus

Calibration frames: 20 darks, 20 bias each night

Processing: PixInsight (Drizzle, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, StarXterminator, NarrowBandNormalization) and Photoshop (final color adjustments)

Bortle Class: 7

Acquisition:

Around 5.5 hours worth of 180s subs fully calibrated and dithered.

Equipment:

Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, Optolong L-Ultimate, 0.85x reducer+flattener, rotator+filter holder, SVBony 40mm F/4 guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with pale yellow no.8 and UV/IR cut filters.

Processing:

-Drizzle preprocessing and stacking in Siril;

-Background extraction in GraXpert;

-SPCC in Siril;

-Deconvolution in Siril;

-Denoise in GraXpert;

-Extract HII and OIII data in Siril and generate HOO image;

-Background normalization;

-GHS and black point adjustments;

-Final denoising in GraXpert.

90 1 Minute Subs from a Bortle 8

Telescope - Svbony Sv503 70mm
Mount - Skywatcher EQ AL55i
Camera - ZWO Asi585 MC Pro
Filter - Svbony Sv240
Processed in PixInsight

• SVBONY SV183 Telescope Filter:IR Pass Filter 2 Inch 685nm Reduce the Effects of Seeing for Planetary Photography Contrast Enhancement  
• iPhone 16 pro max default camera app. Video edited in Lightroom mobile to bring some details out.  
• normal camera mode  
• Milky Way bortle 8   
• Televue filter adapter 48mm and phone holder  
• Pvs14 Gen 3 monocular:  
• Photocathode Sensitivity: 2058  
• FOM: 2700  
• SNR: 37.5  
• EBI: .7  
• Halo: .7  
• Center resolution: 72  
• Unfilmed/filmless  
• Gated 18UM 11769 style

Moon photo taken 8/30/26 from Houston, Texas with Sony a7R V through Takahashi TSA-120 telescope with Vernonscope Dakin 2.4x barlow on ZWO AM5. Best 50% stack of 2,400 RAW file images with remote trigger. Aligned in PIPP, stacked in AutoStakkert 4, processed in Photoshop.

See also: The publication in ArXiV.

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

• Telescope: Bresser Messier 6" Dobsonian 150/1200
• Camera: ZWO ASI224MC
• 2.5x Barlow
• Took 1500 images, processed through PIPP, Autostakkert, and Registax