Adventures with astrophotography

Thanks. Yes, it is difficult to process as well. You do need a low lit room to get it right. The original final image is much better as I had to compress it to hell to get it a reasonable size to put here. The original is a 2.4GB FITS format file :astonished:

Those pics are just phenomenal, thanks for sharing.

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Something I can only dream of currently, but satisfies my nerdy curiosity !

This one is the Monkey Head Nebula. Again, it’s jpg compressed to within an inch of it’s life and also cropped to make it small enough, but it doesn’t look too bad.

After my experiences with the Filamentary Nebula above, I’ve had to upgrade my computer some. Doubled the memory to 32GB and got a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD drive to use as working drive space to replace the 2TB raid 0 array of spinning rust, Certain operations that took 5-6 minutes now take 6-8 seconds. The full stack processing of the one here took only 3 minutes whereas before it would have taken about an hour.

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The next one is a composite image of the Heart Nebula and the Fish Nebula. This time, I have rendered the image in what is known as the ‘Hubble Palette’, (or as near as I can) used by the Hubble Space Telescope when taking pictures using various filters. The orangey areas are from hydrogen emissions ( Hα ) and the blue is from oxygen (OIII).

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Fantastic images, I hope its not too cold in the evening so I can peer at the night sky when I am there in a couple of weeks.

The other night, I stepped outside to go around closing all the shutters…

The street lights had gone off at 10pm so by now it really was pitch black… and I was scuttling by torch light…

Happened to look skywards and simply stood there spellbound…

It was magnificent… I was lost in my thoughts, busy pointing and muttering the names of the constellations … and OH had to yank me indoors before I froze to death… :rofl:

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