Those are beautiful shots! Nice work, and nice work to Nik too. I used SkyView Lite for a while, but I'm now realizing just how limited it is compared to other ones. Night Sky is really great, and so is the Stars & Universe app. There's still some premium features on the apps, but I'm really enjoying just how many things I can see now.

Also, there is a frick ton of starlink satellites.

Was in a very rural part of the state with minimal light and staying on a cabin next to an airfield. Woke up at 0230 to take a look and it was immediately naked eye visible against the pre-dawn light. 2029/07/12

1(2020-07-12) by Nikky, on Flickr

I'm not at all a professional as Alex has clearly pointed out with his recent criticism (lol) but here are two of my favorite shots from last night:

Here you can see the comet toward the bottom of the picture but above the cloud. Also, the Big Dipper.

EDIT: I feel really lame cause other peoples captures of the comet look big and bright. Is that really what you saw? Because I'm jealous. Anyways, at least I captured it a tiny bit:


And here I pointed my camera toward the band of the Milky Way:


I was able to see Comet NEOWISE faintly with my binoculars, but was nearly impossible to see with my naked eye. I went out to a dark and remote spot around 9:45, approximately an hour after sunset. Anyways, hope you like these

Here is a composite image of the moon, as captured last night on August 2. The stars probably look cheap by many standards but I think it looks cooler.



Also, here is Jupiter and its moons as captured on July 24.



This was shot at 250mm and then I had to zoom and crop it significantly, but I thought it was really cool to see. I don't remember what order the moons were that night but I believe it is Callisto on the left, then Ganymede, Io, and Europa on the right of Jupiter.

Doing me dirty like that


Comparison is the thief of success. Or something like that.
What I saw? No. But what I captured? Yes. It was really hard for me to see where I was but the camera picked it up much better. As I said in an earlier post:



Looking at that same post I quoted, there is a massive difference in brightness between the two nights even four days apart. Hard to say if that's due to the comet moving or differences in lenses though. NEOWISE in Nikky's shot at 70mm and it's quite distinguishable, where as my 35mm is not but his 70mm is definitely brighter than my 85mm shot. I used my 85mm on 07/20 so I'll post that up in a bit.

An educated guess, the comet was brighter when it was closer to the Sun but as it got farther away it got dimmer and dimmer (even though it got closest to Earth on July 22nd).

Also, here's the time-lapse result of all those photos I shot on the 6D and T2i. The T2i was using the 85mm and 10s exposure (f/1.8), and the comet is super visible as opposed to the 35mm on the 6D where I shot at 15s (f/2.8).

I had my own outing to see Neowise a couple weeks ago. I have to say, I think we were pretty successful: (Click either to enlarge)


And then I literally pointed our camera straight up in the sky to try to get some nice stars without light pollution from neighboring cities and happened to catch a band of the milky way


Both shot on my girlfriend's Pixel 4

I've been getting a little more serious with regards to astrophotography. I'm building myself a telescope and am finally starting to think about buying a nice DSLR camera (for the moment I'm borrowing my brother's) and I've been traveling (short distances) to get to darker skies. Here are my best two images of recent, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion Nebula: (click to enlarge)





These two pictures I actually didn't travel to darker skies to take, so I was in a class 6 light polluted sky (hence the noise in these images), but I hope to soon travel somewhere about an hour away to get to class 3 and try again. Hope you enjoy!

I recently just got myself a new telescope and I wanted to try it out on some planets. Unfortunately right now in the northern hemisphere there are no planets in the sky until well past midnight, so I was up very very late last night.

However, it was well worth the sacrifice of sleep because here are my stacked and processed results:



Now, these were done with no automatic tracking, it was just me twisting the knob when it was about to leave the frame so I didn't get as many useful frames per time that I could have, but now that I know that I can get at least this good of results, I think I'm definitely going to get a motorized attachment for my mount. That will have the added bonus of opening up deep sky objects for me to photograph. Looking forward to seeing what else I can do with this setup!

I took a photo of the moon last night around 10pm, as it set over the horizon in the west. I'm not exactly sure what caused this color, but it looked like the color of Mars to the naked eye which was absolutely incredible.

I have not adjusted the colors at all, this is straight out of the camera, just cropped a bit. I know it's not the sharpest, but still very cool to me!

I have been TAing a class that has access to a telescope in Sonoma, CA, so I've had a lot of telescope time. I'm currently working on imaging NGC 2523, and this is the result of about an hour and a half of observation time. As the quarter progresses, I want to get more time to really cut down on the noise and expose more of the arm structure. But I'm really proud of this as a first draft, especially for a magnitude 11.9 object.

Here is what the galaxy should look like

Nice work! It's amazing what's out there.

On a semi-related note, I wonder what kind of detail Webb will be able to get.

Streamlined my imaging processing pipeline and have gotten better at dialing in the settings in ds9.
This is M33 taken with r, g, and i filters.

My goodness, ordelore, that image is absolutely -stellar- !

Hopefully I can get to this quality sometime.

We had a beautiful naked-eye Moon Dog tonight!

Shot with "Night Sight" on my Pixel 3
Click to enlarge

Very proud of how this one turned out. 5 hours of observing time in total split across r-band, g-band, and h-alpha filters.

It's the spooky hunchback dinosaur! I don't have a good sense of how difficult the Horsehead Nebula actually is to image, but I'm impressed.

Welp, the 2024 total solar eclipse came and went, and since I had fully experienced the 2017 eclipse, I thought this time I'll sacrifice a minute to get some photos, and then enjoy it for the remaining 75%. Here's my capture! (click to enlarge)

Thats pretty cool. All of my eclipse pics are really bad and just look like the crescent moon.