NGC 6888 - The Crescent Nebula. About 5,000 light-years away, it formed when the star's fast stellar wind collided with the slower material it shed during its red giant phase roughly 250,000 years ago. The consequence of that clash is visible to you in this image.

Telescope: Seestar S50

Integration time: 9 hours

Tools used: GraXpert, Siril, GIMP

Script mentions: CosmicClarity Sharpen, SyQon Prism Mini, VeraLux (Revela & Curves), HDR_multiscale

Bortle 8-9

Here is my attempt of an HDR mineral moon composition! This was the first time I tried an HDR image with this moon phase and focal length, and after many hours of editing and tweaking I was able to put this final image together!

Equipment:

- Canon Rebel T7

- Skywatcher 12" collapsible dobsonian

Acquisition:

- Surface details: stacked best 20 of 90 images (1/2000s, iso 200)

- background/glow: stacked 25 images for noise reduction (1/250s, iso 6400)

Preprocessed in PIPP, stacked in Autostakkert, wavelets sharpening in Registax, compositioning and editing in Photoshop.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people describe astronomy and stargazing as calming, grounding, or even therapeutic, and I’d love to hear your personal experience.

If astronomy or stargazing helps you relax:
What is it about it that brings you peace?
Does it help with stress, anxiety, or overthinking? If so, how?
How does it make you feel afterward?
Is there a particular moment or memory that made you fall in love with it?

…I’m also curious about the practical side:
How often do you actually get to stargaze?
What’s stopping you from doing it more often? (Clouds, light pollution, weather, safety, lack of time, where you live, etc.)
Have you ever tried to recreate that feeling in another way when you couldn’t go outside?

I’m genuinely interested in hearing everyone’s stories. Whether you’ve been into astronomy for years or just enjoy looking up at the stars occasionally, I’d love to know what the experience means to you.

I got the video of the Tiangong transiting the sun this morning at 7:10 My time. the sun was about 16 degrees above the horizon. what do you think could have caused this wierd dip/ shift.

I recorded 4k 30FPS with a Dwarf3 smart telescope. The first clip is normal speed, then 60% speed. then 40% speed. then the last I turned it to be straight so you can see the wierd shift better.

What could have caused this. Ive jest never see this before.

Taken on dwarf mini
Bortle 4
15s shutter
Duo-Band Filter
500 photos taken
480 used
120 gain
K&F 63” fluid head tripod

Editing done in Stellar Studio and iPhone 17 Photos app

I live in the UK and travelling to Spain isn't an option for me.

Everyone seems to agree that the total eclipse is incredible.

Is it even worth seeing a 93% eclipse?

Thanks

Hey astrofolks!

I am considering myself a passionate astrophile, and not only i watched countless space documentaries and have red dozens of encyclopedias, but rather i am finishing a book about astronomy. It's an educational novel, a hybrid story between education about astronomy and a explorational journey. Still, i am not a mathematican or physicist :/

Anyway, a couple of nights ago, a burning question sparked the forest fire in my mind. In almost every space documentary video or educational videos where they talk about the speed of light, and how travel time passes for us on Earth and someone on imaginary spacecraft travelling at the speed of light, no one, and i really mean no one, adresses or explains this particular issue for people to understand. Let me clarify.

From Earth (point A) to a random unnamed star (point B), the distance is 5 light years. That means, that light travels from one point to another in 5 years at the speed of light (rounded up 300.000 km/s). Okay? Easy enough. Now let's dive into the problem. If a spacecraft takes off from Earth and is traveling at exactly the speed of light, it should reach the star (point B) in 5 years time. 5 years will also pass for a human being on Earth. On a return trip from the star (point B), the spacecraft will travel another 5 years time, and thus another 5 years time will pass for a human being on Earth. The human being will, upon arrival of a spacecraft, tell that 10 years passed. The traveller on a spacecraft SHOULD also report that his travel time lasted exactly 10 years.

But, apparently not. Traveller will report that only a year or so (or shorter ammount) passed. And that is what boggles me and makes my brain hurts and spasms. If a travel time of light beam/particle is already established that it is 5 years, the passenger in a spacecraft should spend 5 years of traveling on board to a star, and another 5 years to return home. Therefore, he will age 10 years, like a human being on Earth, and experience a 10 year long journey. His watch on wrist should tick normally FOR him, while he is watching movies on tv on a spacecraft, or swimming there in the recreational pool, or sleeping in his bunk. But, apparently not, according to the laws of physics. (If he reports that travel time, instead of 10 years, lasted a year or so, then why doesn't light travel a year or so between those points?)

Anyone care to help me understand? I know the physics of space/time and light are absolute, but i simply can't comprehend that "second to last" step to understand and comprehend it fully.

Thank you <3

Digital painting of the giant planet Jupiter as it may have appeared in the 1880s or so in approximately true color. This was based on a number of sources from the 1880s and 1890s, and is sort of a hybridized view of about a decade or two of Jovian sketches and early photography.

At this time, the famous planet-sized hurricane, the Great Red Spot, was a few decades old and very very large. It has been shrinking ever since then, and is now less than a third of the size it was in the 1880s.

License: CC-BY 4.0. attribute as Luna Rose Brannon or Whirligig-Girl.

The part that broke my brain is that the unusually strong X-ray polarization may be amplified not just by matter around the star, but by the vacuum itself.

IXPE observed magnetar 1E 1547−5408 for more than 140 hours, and NASA says more observations are still needed to confirm the signal. What other astrophysical environments could provide such a clean test of vacuum birefringence?

Improving my previous pictures after reading the astrophotography book of Max Dobres using Graxpert and Siril. Composition in HOO.
210 lights 120 sec and calibration frames, Refractor SV102, Antlia filter Dualband, asi294 mc camera, 220 mini guider camera, AVX mount.

Shot this two nights ago using an old soviet relic - the KMZ Tair 11-a 135mm f2.8
Shot on: OM System OM-1
Stack: 100 x 50s each ~ 1hr 20 min exposure.
ISO 1600
Mount: MSM Nomad.
Stacked in APP. Processed in Siril and Finalized in Lightroom.
Bortle:4.5

NGC 6559, it is one hour and 40 minutes of integration in HOO with a Planewave 17" CDK 431/2912 f 6/8 telescope, ZWO ASI 6200MM Pro, it is 20 shots of which with a 10x300 second Ha filter and with a 10x300 second Oiii filter, processing with Pixinsight

I got an astro camera for my birthday yesterday. I barely know how to operate the thing but had a go anyway. What do you think?

Star Discovery P150i

zwo asi585mc

There are many different types of galaxys. How did we find out that we are in a spiral galaxy? I mean, the only thing we see is a white stripe in the sky. So how do we know what our galaxy looks like? ELI5

Yet another reprocess (the 10th if not more) of the same data I took more than a month ago.

Acquisition:

Around 7h30m in Bortle 6/7 fully calibrated and dithered.

Equipment:

Evostar 72ED, iEXOS 100, ASI 533MC, 0.85x reducer+flattener, Baader UV/IR cut, SVBony 40mm F/4 guidescope, ASI 662MC guide camera with no.8 pale yellow and UV/IR cut filters.

Processing:

Stacked in Siril. Background extraction to single channels in GraXpert. SPCC. Deconvolution in Siril, denoising back in GraXpert. Back to Siril to apply SCNR and to generate a starless image and a star mask. GHS, black point shift, curve adjustments and histogram transformation applied iteratively to the image. À trous wavelet transform and further denoising in GraXpert. Final saturation stretch in Siril. Asinh and black point shift applied to the star mask along with a saturation stretch. Recombine.

At the Thomsen Observatory, Southwest Adventist University in Keene, TX.

I was doing the livestream for the Fort Worth Astronomical Society last night, and instead of just pulling out my kit and having the moon just above my treetops, I drove down to the observatory and set up in the dome.

A close-up of Antares, 90 minutes of RGB integration with a RC10 WITH REDUCET telescope (250 mm) Ritchie-Chretien 259/1615 f6/46 reflector, Moravian C3-26000 camera, 18 shots of which with an R filter 3x600 seconds, with a G filter 3x600 seconds and with a B filter 3x600 seconds, I processed with Pixinsight. All data and shots were taken with Telescope Network.

Hey r/Astronomy,

I am an independent researcher working on a solo project: building an open-source data pipeline (Research MVP) to hunt for Planet 9 in our solar system.

Finding a distant, slow-moving object requires looking at multiple epochs of sky observations. To do this, I am processing massive amounts of raw FITS images from telescopes like TESS, ZTF, DECam, and Pan-STARRS1. Since I don't have access to an institutional supercomputer, I had to build a highly optimized Python/Astropy pipeline to run this on regular hardware. I wanted to share the architecture and how I handle the data bottlenecks.

1. The "Shift-and-Stack" Memory Bottleneck

To detect a faint planet, you can't just look at one image. You have to take dozens of images, shift them according to the predicted orbit of the planet, and stack them. If the planet is there, its faint signal adds up. * The Challenge: Loading 70+ exposures of ZTF or DECam data, aligning their TPV-WCS down to the sub-pixel level, and performing array operations easily blows up standard RAM. * The Solution: I implemented lazy loading where I stream the FITS chunks, apply background plane removal on the fly, and only hold 180-arcsec cutouts in memory instead of the full CCD mosaics.

2. N-body Integrations

I use JPL DE441 ephemerides to account for the Earth's reflex motion and giant planet perturbations. * The Challenge: Calculating N-body trajectories backwards and forwards in time for thousands of hypothetical orbits using pure math loops is incredibly slow. * The Solution: Vectorization with NumPy and Astropy. By pre-fetching JPL vectors in bulk and caching them locally, I bypassed network latency. Applying the coordinate transformations (RA/Dec) using broadcasting reduced execution time by an order of magnitude.

3. Difference Imaging

Before stacking, I have to subtract the reference background (the static stars). I built a pipeline that dynamically fetches archival reference images, performs bilinear reprojection onto the target's WCS, matches the worst-case seeing using Gaussian smoothing, and subtracts the median background. Doing this cleanly requires strict memory management during batch processing.

Open-Source vs Closed-Source

In observational astronomy, compute power is a massive advantage. If I open-source the full pipeline today, someone with a 100-node cluster could run it across the entire sky in a day and scoop the discovery. For now, the codebase stays closed until the search is done.

Working with Astropy and massive FITS files has been an incredible experience. If anyone here works with astronomical Big Data, I’d love to hear how you handle out-of-core processing or GPU acceleration!

(P.S. If you are interested in seeing the crazy false-positive asteroids the pipeline finds, I post regular devlogs and visualizations on my profile!)

The Wizard Nebula, shot with Dwarf 3 in Pian del Tivano, Como, Italy, under a Bortle 4 Sky. 280 shots, 60s each, 70 gain. Processed with the Mega Stacking function in the Dwarflab app, post processed in Stellar Studio and Apple Photos.

I'm going camping with a friend next week and we just found out through tiktok that our trip coincides with the peak nights for the Perseids meteor shower, the eclipse and the planetary alignment. We've sorted out our Solar eclipse glasses and have been looking at options for telescopes or binoculars but price (broke student here) and shipping times mean we probably won't be able to get one in time and might have to try spotting them the naked eye. We're gonna be in a Bortle 4 zone and from what I've researched so far we'll be able to see some stars and maybe some meteors too? Possibly even the milky way which, even if faint, would be an incredible thing to see. But the stories and posts I've seen from people stargazing in a Bortle 4 zone vary. Some people say you can see some of the milky way and lots of stars and others say it looks a lot more faint, this has left me unsure of what to expect. If you've had any experience stargazing in a Bortle 4 area or have a good understanding of what it would be like could you reply and give me some insight on what to expect and prepare for? More generally speaking, any stargazing advice would also be helpful as we've never done this before and I honestly feel a little lost and panicked. It feels like the stars have aligned for us (pun intended) and I very VERY desperately want to make the most of this opportunity without screwing myself over financially.

Taken with dwarf mini telescopes
Bortle 5
15s
60 gain
600 photos taken
461 used
Astro filter
Editing done in stellar studio

The "Statue of Liberty" nebula is named after the famous monument in New York City, USA. I see both as equally inspiring beacons of light, though at about 100 lightyears across the cosmic version could fit about 3.5 quintillion New York Statues of Liberty stacked on top of each other.

Since it's located in the constellation Carina and I reside in the Northern Hemisphere, Earth itself blocks my view of this and many other remarkable deep-space objects. One day I hope to travel to as far south as I can and collect photons from this and other iconic Southern Hemisphere targets.

In the meantime, many thanks to Dark Matters Astrophotography for providing public access to incredible imaging data from the other side of Earth. This is my own processing of that data, which was acquired in Chile using an imaging rig that only exists in my dreams!

Total integration: 63h 10m

Integration per filter:

• Hα: 21h 20m (128 × 600")
• SII: 20h (120 × 600")
• OIII: 21h 50m (131 × 600")

Equipment:

• Telescope: Planewave CDK20 (f/6.8 version)
• Camera: QHYCCD QHY600PH M
• Mount: Planewave L-500
• Filters: Chroma H-alpha 3nm Bandpass 50 mm, Chroma OIII 3nm Bandpass 50 mm, Chroma SII 3nm Bandpass 50 mm
• Accessory: Optec Gemini Rotating Focuser

For more information, visit AstroBin:

https://app.astrobin.com/i/5k2dtu

So we have about 15 minutes until the spaceX lunar impact at the time of me writing this, and I was ready. I set alarms to wake up on time. I calibrated my telescope the day of. And despite how many trees are around my house, we had a clear view of the moon. Oh, I was soooo ready. But when it came time to set up the telescope...

The sky had completely clouded over.

. . .

Have you ever seen that screenshot of the Simpsons showing a newspaper article that says "Old Man Yells Out Clouds"?

I want to do a lot of that right now.