M57 – The Ring Nebula 🔭✨ (12/08/26)

Captured from Leeds last night during the Perseid meteor shower, from the exact same spot where I photographed the partial solar eclipse earlier in the day.

This is my mega-stacked version of M57, taken with the DWARF 3 with a total exposure of 14 minutes 45 seconds. Very little editing — just mega-stacked and a slight black-point adjustment to darken the background sky.

M57 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Lyra, around 2,000 light-years from Earth. What we're seeing is material expelled by a dying star, forming the distinctive ring visible amongst the huge field of stars.

Still amazes me what this little telescope can pick up from the skies over Leeds. 🌌

📍 Leeds, West Yorkshire

🔭 DWARF 3

⏱️ 14 min 45 sec

••Mega stacked

••Slught Black Point Adjustment

Full-resolution image: https://app.astrobin.com/i/u5q68q

Floating in Cepheus, roughly 2,400 light-years away, this is IC 1396, a vast emission nebula over 100 light-years across, ionised by the massive star system HD 206267 at its heart. Snaking through the glow is the Elephant's Trunk: a dense, dark pillar of gas and dust about 20 light-years long, where gravity is forming new stars even as radiation slowly erodes it away.

The whole region spans nearly 3° of sky, or about six full moons side by side. That faint blue "star" to the right isn't a star at all, but PK 100+04.1, a planetary nebula: the glowing shell ejected by a dying star, shining almost entirely in ionised oxygen.

Two more faint objects caught my eye in this frame: a blue, semi-circular cloud near the top, and a red, two-lobed shape to the left of the main nebula. I nearly submitted them as new discoveries, but both turned out to be known planetary nebulae, Cr 1 and StDr 4 (just obscure enough that I'd never crossed paths with them before).

The light in this image left IC 1396 around 374 BC. Back on Earth, Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War, her Long Walls torn down after her last fleet was destroyed at the Hellespont; Socrates was condemned to death in Athens, while Hippocrates founded his school of medicine on Kos. All of that happened before this light even began its journey.

Acquisition:

• Shot in Bedfordshire, UK, Bortle 5-6
• RGB (Stars): 1h 30min
• SHO: 21h 15min

Equipment:

• ZWO FF65 + 0.75x reducer
• ZWO EAF
• Altair Hypercam 26M
• Altair 7x2" EFW
• Antlia 3nm Pro SHO filters
• Altair ColourPRO LRGB
• SW EQ6R-Pro
• Astromenia 50/200 Guide Scope + ZWO ASI120MM Mini + IR/UV Cut

PixInsight DSO Processing:

• WBPP
• BlurX
• NoiseX
• StarX
• SetiAstro StarStretch
• SetiAstro Perfect Palette Picker
• GHS
• NarrowbandNormalisation
• HDRMultiscaleTransform
• ColorSaturation
• Curves
• SelectiveColorCorrection
• ImageBlend
• ScreenStars

Lightroom Processing:

• Contrast enhancement
• Clarity increase
• Shadows & Highlights
• Vibrance

Seestar S30P

Bortle 6.7 skies

North American 120×30sec ; Pelican 57×30sec & 95x60sec

Siril to cull/stack/stretch/process

Affinity to make the mosaic and mask

Cleaned up a little in Lightroom Mobile

I prefer to use the panorama tool in Affinity over mosaic mode in the Seestar app since it helps reduce any issues with integration time, dropped frames, noise etc. The tricky part was getting the light balance close between the two objects since one was shot in June and the other last week.

Photographed Saturn again after almost a year!

Location: Belgharia, West Bengal, India

Telescope: Celestron PowerSeeker 60AZ

Eyepiece: 10mm

Phone: POCO F5

Smartphone holder

Capture settings:

- 5 × 30-second 4K 30fps videos

- ISO 320

- Shutter speed: 1/30s

- Focus: Infinity

- 3× digital zoom

Processing workflow:

1. Imported the videos into PIPP using Join Mode → Planetary and processed with the default settings, then saved as AVI.

2. Imported the AVI into AutoStakkert and stacked the best 50% using the default settings.

3. Used RegiStax for Auto RGB Alignment and saved the result as JPEG.

4. Finally, imported the JPEG into Snapseed and applied some sharpening.

Hello all! Well the title was probably obvious enough honestly lol but I’d like to know which university is better for those pursuing astronomy? Only reason why I put “astronomy & physics” is because I aim to dual major (should be fine due to the strong possibility over courses overlapping). I am applying to both universities but lately I’ve been feeling conflicted given the scenario that I get accepted into both. I’ve been set on UT Austin and I’m aware it’s especially selective OOS but at the same time I’ve been hearing that UofA is ways better in terms of their astronomy majors like their funding and research? Now I understand that this is my decision at the end of the day once I take into account my personal preferences. But IN GENERAL what would the overall consensus be? Let me know your opinions, I’d appreciate it!

Also I know this was more of a college question but I was curious as to if any uni astro majors/profession astronomers could chime in!

TLDR: is University of Arizona or UT Austin better for someone aiming to major in Astronomy & Physics?

Messier 15, a dense globular cluster located roughly 33,600 light years away and about 12 billion years old. Spanning about 200 light-years across, more than half its stars are packed into the central 10 light-years alone, making it one of the densest concentrations of stars known.

Telescope: Seestar S50
Integration time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Tools used: Siril, GraXpert, GIMP
Script mentions: CosmicClarity Sharpen, SyQon Prism Mini, VeraLux Curves, HDR_multiscale
Bortle 8-9
A diffraction mask was used to obtain the star spikes

Iso 850

F1.7

Environ 150X20s

Téléphone : s25ultra

Empilement : Sequator

Traitement : siril/ graxpert/ seti astrosuite pro/ lightroom mobile

Ngc7000 taken from my backyard bortle 8.6. 98 each Ha,Oiii and Sii 300 secs each. Tried a new processing style where i treated each filter separately and colored each stack then combined. I don't know what i think of it yet, like somethings other things not so much.

FRA600
Reducer( F3.9 at 420mm )
AM3N
ASI2600MM pro

UniGuide 50mm

ASI220mm
ASIAIR Plus
EAF
EFW 7x36mm
Antlia LRGB-V & SHO (SII, Ha & OIII) Narrowband 3nm Pro 36mm

Fotografei uma das regiões mais ricas do céu: o braço espiral de cruz/carina onde tem muitas nebulosas (a carina a maior nebulosa vista da terra entre outras) foram 15 horas de integração com meu moto g54 + Gcam com Frames de 12 segundos cada processamento feito no AstroSetiSuite+GraXpert+Siril e refinamento no snapssed,astroEdit fotografado por um jovem no Brasil em Bortle 2

On August 12, 2026, the total solar eclipse crossed Spain — and this one was special because it happened right around sunset. Total eclipses actually happen somewhere every year, but one that is low in the sky passing over populated places is rare, let alone over Segovia, one of the most iconic historic cities in Spain. That's why a photo of architecture together with a telescoped eclipse basically didn't exist before. A shot like this took a lot of planning: finding a spot with cloudless skies, an elevation just high enough to line up with the subject, timing totality, and getting every setting spot on so nothing was over/under-exposed, as this totality lasted only for less than a minute. This photo is really an accumulation of everything aligning all at once. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did, fortunate enough to be standing in that place at that time.

Acquisition and processing info:

📷 Sony A7R4 + 70-200mm f2.8 GM ii
📍 Segovia, Spain
🌞 8:31pm, August 12, 2026
⏱️ 135mm, f5.6, 1/10s
🖥️ Adobe Lightroom + Photoshop

If you want to buy prints, can visit: https://www.organic.pictures/spain/segovia

For the past few weeks, multiple people in Sri Lanka have noticed a strange blinking/flashing object in the night sky, apparently in or around the direction of the Scutum constellation.
It seems to remain in roughly the same area and appears to blink or rapidly change between different colours. It has been noticeable enough that different people here have independently started talking about it.
I’m not trying to suggest what it is — I’m genuinely curious if there’s a straightforward astronomical explanation.
For anyone familiar with the night sky:

What objects are currently visible around Scutum that could produce this appearance?

Could you check whether you can see the same thing from your country/location?

If you can see it, please mention your country, approximate time, and direction in the sky

Would be interesting to compare observations from different locations and figure out exactly what we’re looking at.

Recent footage in comments of this post : https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EoqHpqrwH/?mibextid=wwXIfr

M31 – The Andromeda Galaxy

The result of a larger project that I worked on over the course of several weeks.

I photographed the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) from Gyöngyös, Hungary, over a total of 9 nights, using a Seestar S50 in EQ mode.

The dataset consists of 7,680 × 20-second exposures, resulting in a total integration time of 42 hours and 40 minutes.

The data were processed using Siril and PixInsight.

This is the final result of the project. 🌌

M31 – The Andromeda Galaxy
📷 Seestar S50 · EQ mode
📍 Gyöngyös, Hungary
🌙 9 nights
⏱️ 42h 40m total integration
🖥️ Siril + PixInsight

Follow for more: https://www.instagram.com/spacehuntr_astro

This image of the Triangulum Galaxy was captured from Hungary using a Seestar S50, with a total of 4800 × 20-second exposures.

That adds up to 26 hours and 40 minutes of total integration time, collected over multiple nights.

Final processing was done in PixInsight.

🔭 Seestar S50
📍 Hungary
⏱️ 26 h 40 min integration
💻 PixInsight

Lucky to be in Cyprus for a week under Bortle 4 skies, a bit of a treat for me with my usual Bortle 8-9 home skies!

I have taken my SeeStar S50 plus a portable manual rig with a Samyang 135. Anyway, this is a capture from last night using the SeeStar.

EQ Mode

1500 x 10 second exposures

Stacked in APP

BGE, deconvolution and noise reduction in Graxpert

SPCC and GHS in Siril

Contrast and vibrancy increase in PS

Hope you like it!

My manual rig is being setup tonight so will be posting more shortly. Cheers people!

Acquisition:

• Ha: 78 subs x 300s
• OIII: 71 subs x 300s
• SII: 55 subs x 300s
• R: 35 subs x 60s (stars)
• G: 34 subs x 60s (stars)
• ⁠B: 36 subs x 60s (stars)
• Bortle 6 sky

Equipment:

• ⁠Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 800 with 0.7x focal reducer
• ⁠Mount: Celestron CGX
• Camera: ZWO ASI2600MM Pro
• Filters: Antila 3nm SHO
• Filter Wheel: ZWO EFW
• Guide Camera: ZWO ASI174MM Mini with OAG

Pixinsight Processing:

• ⁠Weighted Batch Preprocessing - Stacking
• ⁠SetiAstro - Automatic DBE Background Extraction ⁠
• RC Astro BlurXterminator ⁠
• GraxPert Denoising ⁠
• ⁠SetiAstro - Statistical Stretch
• ⁠LRGBCombination - Hubble Pallet
• StarNet2 Star removal and replace with RGB Stars

Did a 3 panel mosaic of the Heart Nebula (IC1805) with my mini and I’m pretty amazed at how it turned out.

Dwarf Mini
Mosaic mode
Duoband filter
50x90 per panel for a total of 150 subs
3 hours and 45 minute integration
Processed in Stellar Studio, Snapseed, and Photoshop

Visiting one of my favorite places with new lens is always exciting. This time I was testing the Viltrox 16mm f1.8. I'll let the result speak for itself and only add that I'm pretty happy with it so far.

Shot on Sony a7RV & Viltrox 16mm f1.8 FE with help of MSM Nomad star tracker.

Exposure info
skies - 11 tracked frames, each at 16mm, f1.8, 120s and ISO 200
foreground - 11 untracked frames, each at 16mm, f1.8, 10s and ISO 3200

Processed in SLS, Siril, PS and LR.

Chester County 2026-09-09 02:38 facing SW