Laurieast

Norton's Star Atlas Messier's Nebulae and Star Clusters (Kenneth Glyn Jones) Or by electronic means, Connected to the AVX, Cartes Du Ciel for remote goto and control. Planning, Sky Safari 6 Plus, and Stellarium.

SOHO Pic

Very turbulent seeing, but fair transparency. Sky-watcher Explorer 150P, EQ3-2 Duel axis drives, Asi 224mc+IR Cut. AS3, Registax, and PS. I like the Pallas, Murchison area, must get a closer shot. Thanks for looking!

Last night's Moon, very turbulent seeing, but fair transparency. Nothing special, but first time out for a while imaging. Sky-watcher Explorer 150P, EQ3-2 Duel axis drives, Asi 224mc+IR Cut. AS3, Registax, and PS. Thanks for looking!

I got and painted mine 🛰️

Raised the dark point in PS levels then gave it more of an S curve in curves. There is more of a hint of details going on in the outer lower part.

I get that here, they spread out over hours sometimes, and then you get as you say milky skies. They go just west of the zenith going north here, then turn left for North America. When Covid started it all stopped, and had some of the best seeing for years.

Beehive Cluster. Explorer 150p. Canon EOS 500D. Single 180sec on unguided AVX.

Do you stack in Deep Sky Stacker? That seems to reduce the colour depth for me, but so does Affinity.

My version for what it's worth, had to pull up the saturation a lot.

That reticle showing Octans is for the Southern Hemisphere, so aligning with Polaris is going to be difficult. @PatrickOEdit: My mistake sorry, I did not realise the reticle *also* showed Octans, but having now looked at my Celestron version I get it now 🤭

@Ian McCallum I would have thought the thread on the draw tube is 56mm? In which case you could use: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/adapters/astro-essentials-m42-t-adapter-for-sky-watcher-refractors-m56.html

Re-writing.

It was hiding 😉 https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/02/25/webb-mirror-alignment-continues-successfully/

https://twitter.com/NASAWebb NASA Webb has completed 2 more phases of its 3-month mirror alignment process: First, the team made adjustments to its mirror segments & updated the alignment of its secondary mirror, refining each of the 18 dots of starlight from its 18 mirror segments. Then, each of those 18 dots was stacked to produce one unified image. Up next: fine-tuning this single dot of starlight to make it progressively sharper. progressively sharper.

It lets you have two images to work on, one just stars, the other nebulosity only. You open up a copy of your image in StarNet and it takes the stars out. Now with a starless image you can adjust it without it affecting the stars and ending up with much bigger brighter stars as well as the nebulosity. Then with layers in Photoshop or Pixinsight you can add the stars back, after having processed those to your liking. There is a how to here: https://astrobackyard.com/starnet-astrophotography/ And several how to do it videos on YouTube. Have fun!

That's a good image, if you separate out the stars with StarNet ++ from the nebulosity so that you can work on each layer (Stars only or Starless) you can pull much more out of that. You can download StarNet ++ here: https://www.starnetastro.com/download/

Thanks very much 🙂 The detail on yours is far better! I'm planning if the infernal weather ever permits to start over with an Explorer 150p and Asi 224mc and maybe a .95 coma corrector to open up the FOV a bit. (and use PHD2 now I figured it out!)

This is a re-process of an image I took last year, having since learned how to do it a bit better 🙂 1h 42m 102x 60s at iso 1600. Evostar 80ED, Canon EOS 500D, on AVX unguided. Starnet++ helped a lot! Below how it was.

You can right click on something and sync etc. Or to the left of the domes is "Show Mark" Hope that might help somehow.

Webb Team Brings 18 Dots of Starlight Into Hexagonal Formation. https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/02/18/webb-team-brings-18-dots-of-starlight-into-hexagonal-formation/

GradientXterminator works with that.

Asi 224mc here as well, not had any problems. There is a thread about using it on a Mac here: https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/327692-is-zwo-asi224mc-a-smart-choice-for-mac-osx-and-celestron-8se/