Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[Razvan Mihai]

Monkey head nebula. Total integration time 30 minutes, via Tecnosky 70/420 Apo, with ASI 533 color camera, on iOptron SkyHunter mount, guided.
Processed with Pixinsight and SetiAstroSuite.
Bortle 7, Ploiești, Romania.

 

[Razvan Mihai]

Rosette nebula. Total integration time 60 minutes.
With Canon 600 D, on iOptron SkyGuiderPro mount, through APO Tecnosky 70/420, Ploiești, bortle 7, Romania.
Initial processing with Pixinsight and later reprocessed with SetiAstroSuite.

 

[Razvan Mihai]

Planet Jupiter, through mak 127/1500, 2x barlow, 3 minutes integration.
Processing with PIPP, AS3 and Registax. Denoising with PS.

 

[Razvan Mihai]

M 51. 4 hours total integration (2 nights), with Seestar S50.
Processing and editing with Pixinsight and SetiAstroSuite.
Ploiești, Romania, bortle 7

 

[AlexB23]

Since I'm not willing to chop down trees to increase my field of view, the only thing I could image for the past month has been M27 (Dumbbell nebula):

View attachment 364863

1:1 crop
View attachment 364864

Nikon D810 + Nikkor 800/5.6 @ f/8, 6s subs, 14.5 hours viewing time on Losmandy GM-8, stacking and post-processing using Astro Pixel Processor.

Not only is the nebula and neighborhood rather boring (all things considered), it's also hard for me to image well because of the low elevation (poor seeing) and nearness to celestial equator (which is why the subframe time is so short). At least the final result looks good.... sigh.

Wow, this is high quality. Professional observatories from a hundred years ago and much bigger telescopes could not compete with your work, probably cos CMOS tech can show more contrast compared to film. Goes to show how much telescope tech evolved. And hey, sacrificing one or two trees for great pictures may be alright. Potentially plant two or three trees in an area you will not be using your telescope.

 

[Razvan Mihai]

Helix nebula. Is a planetary nebula, lies about 650 light-years, in the constellation Aquarius.
Image taken with Seestar S50, from Şirnea, BV, Romania.
The target was at low altitude and atmospheric turbulence made its presence felt. Only 40 minutes total integration time. Out of 2 hours of total exposure of 10 seconds each, many were rejected for stacking.
Processing and editing with Pixinsight and Seti Astro Suite.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Wow, this is high quality. Professional observatories from a hundred years ago and much bigger telescopes could not compete with your work, probably cos CMOS tech can show more contrast compared to film. Goes to show how much telescope tech evolved. And hey, sacrificing one or two trees for great pictures may be alright. Potentially plant two or three trees in an area you will not be using your telescope.

Thanks for the compliments!

 

[AlexB23]

Thanks for the compliments!

You're welcome, man.

 

[Andy Resnick]

The moon and jupiter are close enough to capture @ 400mm (about 7 degrees separation), I "helpfully" magnified jupiter pasted it on to better see the detail, one exposed to see the lunar and planetary details, and another exposed to show the 4 galilean moons:

 

[Andy Resnick]

Not many clear nights lately, but I managed to get a reasonable image in the region of IC 434 (Horsehead Nebula in Orion):

Nikon D810 + Nikkor 400/2.8, shot @ f/4 on Losmandy GM-8, 10s subs 25h total integration time, stacking and post processing with AstroPixelProcessor.

This region of the sky has remained very challenging for me to image, so I'm pretty happy how this has been evolving.

There's TONS of deep sky objects in this field of view, including M78 in the top left corner (with all the stacking artifacts). I'll show a 200% crop of IC 426, a molecular cloud:

I'm pleasantly surprised that my equipment is able to scavenge enough photons to reconstruct a molecular cloud, for sure- it's barely above the noise floor. Plus, the shape resembles a dancing mushroom from the film "Fantasia" :)

 

[pinball1970]

This made me smile

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-astronauts-international-space-station-nasa.html

 

[collinsmark]

Jupiter 2026-02-14 06:41.4 UT.

After several weeks and many nights of bad seeing, clouds, terabytes of wasted data, and whatnot, I finally was able to acquire this image. The seeing wasn't great, but it was the best I've had in all my recent attempts (which isn't saying much). This is likely my last attempt at Jupiter for this apparition.

Equipment:
Celestron C14 EdgeHD telescope.
SkyWatcher EQ8-R Pro mount.
TeleVue 2X Powermate.
Astronomik RGB filters with ZWO filter wheel.
ZWO ASI290MM monochrome camera.

Acquisition:
Location: San Diego, California.
Atmospheric seeing was only mildly weird and pissed-off.
10 ms subframe exposure time (all colors).
Three separate 1-minute videos taken for each color, alternating RGBRGBRGB (9 minutes total).
Dark frames also acquired.

Processing:
Each video processed with Autostakkert! to create unsharpened image (9 images total)
o Best 70% of frames kept.
o No normalization.
o 3x Drizzle.
o No sharpening.
o Dark, calibration frames used.
Initial sharpening in PixInsight.
o "Convolution" processes to mitigate drizzle artifacts.
o "MultiscaleLinearTransform" for the heavy lifting of sharpening.
o "Pixelmath" to multiply by a circular mask to eliminate stacking artifacts at frame edges.
Derotation of frames using WinJUPOS (takes 9 sharpened frames and produces, 3 sharpened, derotated frames; one frame for each color).
Channel combination also done using WinJUPOS to create a single, sharpened, derotated, RGB color image.
Second round of sharpening/editing using PixInsight.
o "CurvesTransformation" for relative color corrections/adjustments.
o "UnsharpMask" for a bit more sharpening.
o RC Astro NoiseXTerminator plugin for noise reduction.
o DynamicCrop process for cropping.
Final, minor adjustments; resizing; and JPEG conversion performed in Adobe Lightroom.

Learned readers are correct to question my aggressive drizzle strategy (3x). After all, the data is already oversampled and the drizzle algorithm produces diminishing returns for oversampled data. It was more about producing a larger image than it was about eking out any extra detail. I've had luck in past years using this method compared to simple upsampling. But I concede the difference might be negligible.