This was a very challenging target for us as we are still beginners, but the comet stands out nicely. We hoped for a bit more detail, but shooting with the Samyang 135mm lens is quite a strech for this target.

Equipment:

• Samyang 135mm f2.0
• Fuji X-T5
• Star Adventurer 2i

Images:

• 400x 15s
• ISO 400

More infos here: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/183073/comet/by-maxi_franzi

Day 2 of owning a new (to Me) Lunt60 in preparation for the April 8 eclipse, first time posting here.

Lunt60 Single Stack+ ZWO 1600 Pro at 10C + Atlas EQ-G.

Acquisition in Sharpcap. 0 gain, 2.7ms exposure

PIPP: Cropping and centering

AS!3: selection of best 10% of 500 frames

ImPPG: deconvolution, sharpening, tone curve (inverted surface and stretched prominences)

Seeing, focusing, and pressure tuning were all suboptimal, but I'm still happy to have taken some data through the full process.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Hey all!
I just made following post: My current learning experience as a noob in astrophotography, with very shitty/ minimal equipment (includes pictures too!)

I'm a total beginner, and even my currently best work looks really sad compared to the stunning pictures you share here as real and experienced pros. I have to say, the further I progressed in my journey in the last months, the more I began to appreciate your work. Great job on that! <3

I wanted to encurage you all to make a similar post or comment in this thread and share your past about this special and lovely kind of photography.

I think nobody here has started with equipment more expensive than my annual income and more knowledge about the night sky than any astrologist (Edit: astronomer, I don't think anyone here believes in horoscopes :D) here on earth.
What were your first results, with what equipment? What did you learn over time, and what stuff or trick has improved your results the most?

I'm particularly interested in the stage of you back then, where I am currently am - of just owning a damn (simple + universal) camera and learning the basic stuff.
One of the reasons for that is I want to see what "best result" I can get with this stuff, and what my limits could be.

Hey! I wanted to share my "experience" as a newcomer, starting not only with astrophotography, but also with photography in general recently.
Just a few months ago, I didn't even know what an aperture, stacking or other basic stuff is, and now, I feel a bit proud and think I'm getting there.

I know, it really is not much, but I'm trying to not compare myself with other photographers here who have 30 years of experience and equipment worth more than my yearly income.
I just wanted to share my learning experience with you all, aswell as all issues and stepping stones I've had and (hopefully) grown out of.

As a camera, I use a Sony RX100 III compact camera, which is probably the least thing any of us here think about when talking about astrophotography.

Don't take this post too seriously :) It's only a small anecdote and hopefully a bit entertaining for you all 😊

---

Btw, I also tried to include a few pictures (stacked + edited, aswell as one light frame to compare) in each paragraph for visualization. They're "hidden" behind a spoiler-tag for better readability.

First pictures

They were literally just taken as-is out of the window of my apartment, without any mount, and with 30s shutter speed. No stacking or whatever.

Pics

First stacking tests

Without DBF, usually shitty.

Pics

Using DBFs + better camera settings

In the beginning, I only used the -withoutDBF script.
I started using the display of my E-reader (white, diffuse light) to capture my flats, reduced the shutter speed from ~20-30s to 10s (no more trails) and increased the aperture by one F-stop (2 or 2.2 instead of 1.8, the lowest), which resulted in sharper images with less noise.
Also, I got a cheap camera mount :D

Comparison

Without DBF: Same picture, with DBF added later:

Better software skills

I began to learn better how Siril works and developed my workflow. It's fascinating how much I was able to "rescue".

Learning curve

Edit, just two months prior: Exact same photo/ .fit-file, opened today and edited with my current skills:

Better spot and conditions - Today

Many of the pictures were taken in or near a city, and now, I only have to go a few minutes by foot to get my perfect spot with barely any light pollution.

I also learned to hate our fucking moon - as soon as I notice that we have more than crescent moon, I don't even leave my house, except if I want to make a few pics of the landscape.

Final pics

Additional ones, just because I can

They're single takes or star trails, but still taken at night.
I found them neat too, so I just included them :D

Pics

Future path

I really don't know what this will lead to.

• First, I definitely want to learn my stacking software better, because I think I didn't unreavel all of its' potential yet.
• Also, I want to get a better camera some time, when I have the money for it
• Fight some more issues, namely those from my last post here (lens condensation + tracker)
• and probably much more!

Thank you for reading! :)

For the pros here, who have equipment worth tens of thousands of moneys, this may sound like a troll post, but trust me, it isn't :D

As a beginner, I had a lot of fun photographing the night sky and learning all the post-processing the results of my work for the last months.

A lot of my work went straight to the trash, either because of a bad moon phase, light pollution, condensation, or super stupid mistakes, like forgetting to tick a checkmark in my time lapse mode and then coming home after 2 hours of freezing cold temperatures and seeing that your shutter speed has been 0.2 seconds all along... 😵‍💫 I still learnt a lot from my mistakes and improved rapidly. It was a lot of trial by error, but rewarding.

---

One thing I still fight with is said condensation.
I'm both broke ^(or, even if I had the money, I still wouldn't buy a heating mantle for 250€ just for my amateur photos tbh)^ , and my camera is probably a joke compared to yours.

My workaround has been to use small hand warmers.

(If you don't know what I mean)

(the ones you have to boil first, then click the metal clip, and then they "freeze", becoming warm for 30 minutes)

I activate and then press them against the front of the lens for one minute each 5 minutes or so, which of course sometimes results in

• camera shake,
• missing photos,
• and in the worst case, smears on the photo, which won't even be recoverable with my flats.

The reason for doing that is that I have a Sony RX100 III compact camera, which has a super small lens, so no heating mantle can fit on that.

A friend of mine is already more advanced than me and owns one, but his heating mantle is like 20 cm wide, while my lens is 5 cm max when fully drawn out :D

Do you have any cheap alternatives or DIY solutions for my problem?

---

Also, does anyone have an idea or suggestion on what I can use as star tracker

(?)

(the mount-thing that moves my camera with the rotation of the earth)

when I don't want to spend $$$ on a professional one?

I don't need a super expensive or accurate one, just one that allows me to increase the width of my photo, so I don't have to crop >1/3 of it in the end.
I don't need it to keep my shutter speed at 1 minute+, just to keep it below 15s, like I currently do.

Are there any workarounds, like using an Arduino or so?

Right now, I'm a bit restricted to about ~30 photos @ 10s, because elseway, the crop zone is too small or there are small trails forming.

I had to warm up my lens from time to time to prevent condensation build up, and therefore, every 5th image or so is missing.
Is there a way to artificially fill the gaps in the trails?

It is a bad quality photo taken from a mobile. The circle that surrounds the moon is formed by the refraction of the moonlight when passing through ice crystals present in the atmosphere. At times surrounding the moon itself you can see a circular rainbow (they all are, but we see only half of the solar rainbow). This phenomenon is called a lunar halo.

Quite a big improvement over the last image of Orion I posted, and the two other attempts in between that I didn't post. This is mainly due to the addition of an OG star tracker that has allowed me to take 30" sub exposures and helped me to increase my total integration time. So this was:

• 407 * 30" exposures
• 50 dark frames
• 50 flat frames
• 50 bias frames

shot with:

• Sony A7Cii
• Minolta 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 @ 300mm f/5.6
• OG star tracker

and my processing steps were:

• calibration, registration and stacking in Siril v1.2.0
• background extraction, stretching, colour calibration, and noise removal again in Siril
• final levels adjustment and crop in darktable.

Tonight, if the clouds allow me, I wanted to take pictures with my Skywatcher Star Adventurer mini. As I'm going to set up a small telescope (a Celestron C90) I need a very good alignment to the Polar so that I don't have any traces left. Tips to make an alignment as accurate as possible? Thank you

This is 1158 * 0.8" exposures along with 50 dark and 50 flat frames stacked with Siril. Shot with my Sony A7Cii and a Hasselblad 350mm f/5.6.

My first photo with a telescope. It is not a incredible shoot but I am very proud of it.

Telescope: Celestron C90 Camera: Sony A7R Mk II (APS-C crop mode) Exposition: 1/10"

My first try at IC 1805 with my stock Fuji XT camera. Turned out way nicer than I could’ve imagined.

equipment:

• Samyang 135mm f2.0
• Fuji X-T5 (unmodified)
• STC duo-narrowband clip-in filter
• Star adventurer 2i

frames:

• 550x 60s
• ISO 1600
• f2.8

editing:

• stacked in Siril
• background removal with GraXpert
• editing in Photoshop

More infos on Telescopius: https://telescopius.com/pictures/view/178053/deep_sky/heart-nebula/IC/1805/diffuse-nebula/by-maxi_franzi

If anyone knows what causes the elongated star shape in the top left corner please let me know. I tried to get the focus as perfect as possible.

I love seeing the astro images posted here, but may I share an algorithm for making them even more beautiful?

Most astro images are created from separate red, green and blue images taken with electronic detectors (whether using classic BVR filters in an attempt to replicate what the eye might see, or some other combination in a "false color" image). There are two big problems that are common with the images created in this way (even by professionals).

The first is in the choice of stretch: how brightness on the detector maps to brightness on the displayed image. Most choose a linear or a logarithmic stretch. A linear stretch brings out fine detail at the faint end, but can leave the viewer ignorant of details at the bright end. A logarithmic stretch allows you to bring out details at the bright end, but not the faint end. Instead of these, choose an asinh (inverse hyperbolic sine) stretch, which is able to bring out both the faint and bright features. It scales linearly at the faint end and logorithmically at the bright end, giving you the best of both worlds.

The second is in the handling of saturation: how to display pixels that are too bright for the chosen stretch. Most apply the stretch separately in the red, green and blue channels. This makes the cores of bright objects appear as white in the color image, while they are surrounded by a halo that is more appropriate to the actual color of the object. The color of a pixel should instead be set by considering all of the channels together. This way, bright objects will have a uniform color, regardless of whether the stretch has been saturated in any of the channels.

See here for a direct comparison between the classic approach and this (not really) new algorithm on the old Hubble Deep Field.

If you would like to adopt this algorithm for your own work, there is a python implementation that you might find useful.

This is my second try at the Andromeda galaxy. Still very noisy but happy with the result nonetheless, except the star shape and coma.

• Samyang 135mm f2.0 lens
• Fuji XT-5
• 410 lights @20s
• calibrated and stacked in Siril
• background extraction with GraXpert
• star removal with Starnet++
• stretched in Siril with GHST and levels in PS
• final editing, star recomposition and cropping in PS

I did some astrophotography back in 2014 with some pretty basic gear I scrounged together second hand, and I've been wanting to get back into it for a while but the software situation has always put me off. I got some good results from my free trial of pixinsight but it didn't make sense to purchase. I had another go recently with Siril and got a promising result, so I did a bit more and got this.

It's 1298 * 1" lights untracked shot with my Sony A7Cii and an old Minolta 75-300 lens just on a tripod on my balcony.

This was my very first attempt at planetary imaging with my SCT6. I've been doing EAA work for a few years now, but mostly DSOs through the use of a Hyperstar. Last night I removed the Hyperstar from the rig and made my first attempts at imaging at the native 1500mm focal length.

This was a 5 minute video processed with lucky sampling.