this is my first and maybe only crack at orion this winter, it’s been particularly terrible for astro. i tried for a third panel to include M78, but it was a loss unfortunately, thankfully this turned out better than i was expecting given the time and conditions.

Nikon D850, unmodified Nikon 400mm f/2.8 G ED VR iOptron CEM25p Lacerta MGEN ii autoguider 25x 120s exposures for each panel, 2 panels total bortle 5, -15°C outside Edmonton, Canada

also includes about 2 hours of narrowband data on the horsehead region from a very bright bortle 9 with a 60% moon, mainly as a test for the filter that i haven’t gotten to use yet, but i threw in the data to supplement the broadband data because why not, even though it really didn’t change much. the narrowband data was captured with an astromodified Nikon D610.

Hey all, I realized i never shared this to the superior astrophotography subreddit! This is more of a test than anything, I’d been teaching myself Siril processing for the past couple weeks, this is the image i’ve practiced on. I really didn’t expect this much dust to be visible in such a short exposure time from those sorts of skies! I definitely have so much more to learn and improve on, i know. but i thought i’d share my first go at it! it’s been really hard to get back into my hobbies, so producing an image at all is something i’m a bit proud of :)

Camera: Nikon D610
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 G ED VR
Exposures: 28 x 180s exposures at f/2.8
Tracking: iOptron CEM25P, Lacerta MGENii standalone autoguider
Skies: 40 minutes west of Edmonton, Canada, Bortle 6, no moon
Processing: stacked with flats in Siril 1.2.0, background extraction, photometric colour calibration, and star removal done before stretching the background and stars separately with iterative generalized hyperbolic stretches, reduced noise and cleaned up some artifacts in Photoshop on the background layer, before combining stars and background together again in Siril and doing final colour and brightness corrections on my phone, because my laptop screen is absolute ass.
Any advice or critique is welcome, thanks for looking!

Taken with Google Pixel 6a 300 lights 50 darks

I’d like to see this community grow, here’s my first contribution :)

This was a little side project done with the mechanical egg timer tracker while my main rig was running, i wanted to see what narrowband would look like at a very wide 40mm. it’s about an hour of colour data at f/1.4, and another hour or so of hydrogen alpha narrowband data at f/2, using a 12nm clip in filter. It was surprising how much hydrogen data was visible with the RGB data, adding in the narrowband as a boost barely changed anything unless i wanted to make it super colour inaccurate, but i tried to make this image as colour accurate as possible. All in all, it worked, but the time with the narrowband filter in would’ve been better spent just collecting more unfiltered images at f/1.4 given how dark the skies already were. I think the amount of detail is pretty impressive considering it was shot at 40mm :)

Nikon D610, astromodified
Sigma 40mm f/1.4 Art
No flats, darks, or bias Omegon Minitrack LX2
Bortle 4 skies, no moon

Processed in RawTherapee to choose the best debayering algorithms for the hydrogen and rgb images, and then applied lens profiles to correct vignetting. Stacked each in SiriL, did a background extraction on both, ran starnet on both and did a recomposition on the colour image to stretch the background separate from the stars. finally brought the stretched starless hydrogen image and the stretched colour image into photoshop, where i manually aligned them and blended the narrowband data in with the screen blending mode such that it would only boost the reds in the corresponding areas. I’m sure that could be done in Siril too but i’m still learning it, and i’m more familiar with photoshop :) And finally some very minor curves adjustments to get the colour to as close to natural as i could, added a slight vignette back in, and there you go! Let me know what you’d improve on or what could be worked on :)

Jupiter & (left-right) Io, Ganymede & Callisto

Captured w/ a Celestron 8” HD on a CGEM mount. ASI178 Color camera.

Best 750 of 1000 RAW video frames stacked w/ ASI STUDIO software. Sharpness, contrast, brightness & NR were adjusted in ASI studio.

Unsharp mask & levels adjustments in photoshop.

This is to replace the original Astrophotography sub that decid d to kill itself with memes and trash.

Pictures of astrophotography only.