lefty7283 @ lefty7283 @lemmy.world

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176

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316

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3 yr. ago

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Yeah about that…

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/

Edge of the frame. Since stars are point sources of light any distortion from the optics, trailing from a long exposure, or even the atmosphere will distort them. IMO the center stars are what I’d consider acceptable for an untracked image, but then again I don’t really do much widefield astrophotography. It could also be your camera shifted slightly or from walking around near it?

There’s a number of YouTube channels of varying quality/expertise that are good for beginners, like AstroBackyard, Alaskan astro, cuiv the lazy geek to name a few. The cloudynights forum should If your a discord person, we do have one for this community (.gg/astrophotography) that’s pretty active with a lot of info that’s been gathered over the years, and it’s where I’ve learned most of what I know about the hobby.

Looks great for a first shot! If you took a couple more exposures you could stack them and use dark frames to help with the hot pixels. Also if you ever get a star tracker you could stop the lens down slightly to help with the distorted stars on the edges, but overall it looks pretty decent

How long of an exposure was this?

Good ol’ lithobraking

I've finally moved away from my bortle 9 balcony! Only had one clear night so far and used it to map out my horizons, (a considerable improvement from the balcony) and spend a few hours on something bright and high up in the sky. Still got a huge ass-backlog of pics from the old place to process, but I'll chip away at that eventually. Captured on June 11th, 2026 from a Bortle 6 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: 3 hours 2 minutes (Camera at half unity gain, -15°C)

• L - 37x120"
• R - 18x120"
• G - 18x120"
• B - 18x120"
• 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
• Multiscale Gradient Correction with MARS Project data

Luminance linear:

• BlurXterminator (correct only)
• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks
• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
• BlurXTerminator (correct only)
• HSV Repair
• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images
• DeepSNR Noise reduction
• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc
• NoiseXterminator for chrominance noise reduction
• Invert > SCNR (masked) > Invert to remove this one very magenta colored star
• More curves
• Dynamic crop in on just the cluster
• Resample to 75%
• DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy
• Annotation

No hobby is safe

Upgraded to the beyond 2e from my reverb G2 and I absolutely love it! Had to go through a couple different face plates since my eyelashes were touching the lenses, but their support was really good about getting a replacement/new face scan.

Imo the weakest area is the audio strap, especially coming from the G2 which has identical speakers to the index, but in the future I’ll probably look into the project beyondex strap to get the index speakers working with it

Had the chance to do cadaver dissections and synovial fluid is some fascinating stuff! Slightly mucusy, but incredibly slick

This is from stacking dozens of exposures and not rejecting out the trails. The satellite still moves for the few seconds between each exposure, creating the gaps

My cat climbed inside the empty clothes hamper as soon as laundry was done

It should work, NASA is working on it. https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-navigation-program/nasa-successfully-acquires-gps-signals-on-moon/

Yep! Saturn, Mars, and Mercury, respectively

Shai Hulud 🙏

update they posted earthrise too

We finished out For All Mankind rewatch just in time for the new episode to come out!

For bad movie night last night we did Cats and Dogs (2001). Imo more it’s more silly than bad, but still about pets being secret spies at war with each other.

Kinda vibes at this point, but on my broadband images I'll loop through something like LLLLRRGGBB in my sequence. main thing is making sure there's good enough signal in the final luminance image. Seeing the SNR plots while live stacking is also very helpful for knowing when I hit diminishing returns for a particular filter

So I originally shot this back in 2020 from my in-law's house in a Bortle 4 area. Only got a handful of LRGB subs because my guide cam did not wanna talk to my laptop for most of the session back then. Recently I decided to shoot some Ha from my B9 apartment and give it a reprocess in HaLRGB. Overall I'm very pleased with this improvement after 6 years! Captured captured in February 2020 and December 2025 from bortle 4 and 9, respectively.

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: 9 hours 55 minutes (Camera at unity gain, -15°C)

• Ha - 48x600"
• L - 12x300"
• R - 4x300"
• G - 4x300"
• B - 3x300"
• 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
• 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

Luminance linear:

• BlurXterminator
• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)
• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

Ha Processing:

• StarX to remove stars
• Subtracted red continuum to create a 'clean' Ha image using pixelmath
• Pixelmath to combine the clean Ha image into the RGB image

largely following this advanced narrowband combination guide, also made by jimmy

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks
• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
• StarX to remove stars (to be used for star addition later)
• PixelMath per the advanced narrowband guide to add Ha into the red and blue channels
• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Stars only image:

• BlurXterminator for discortion correction and some mild star reduction
• HSV repair
• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear (less aggressive stretch)
• Slight curve adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images
• DeepSNR Noise reduction
• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc
• More curves
• LocalHistogramTransformation
• Pixelmath to add in the stretched 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))

• NoiseXTerminator for some small scale chrominance noise reduction
• Resample to 70%
• DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy (not a whole lot going on in the background)
• Annotation