I’ve been in 2 eclipses, and even fully knowing what was going to happen, the dumb lizard part of my brain was freaking out a little because the sun just disappeared at 2pm. It’s a wild experience
Edge of the frame. Since stars are point sources of light any distortion from the optics, trailing from a long exposure, or even the atmosphere will distort them. IMO the center stars are what I’d consider acceptable for an untracked image, but then again I don’t really do much widefield astrophotography. It could also be your camera shifted slightly or from walking around near it?
There’s a number of YouTube channels of varying quality/expertise that are good for beginners, like AstroBackyard, Alaskan astro, cuiv the lazy geek to name a few. The cloudynights forum should If your a discord person, we do have one for this community (.gg/astrophotography) that’s pretty active with a lot of info that’s been gathered over the years, and it’s where I’ve learned most of what I know about the hobby.
Looks great for a first shot! If you took a couple more exposures you could stack them and use dark frames to help with the hot pixels. Also if you ever get a star tracker you could stop the lens down slightly to help with the distorted stars on the edges, but overall it looks pretty decent
I've finally moved away from my bortle 9 balcony! Only had one clear night so far and used it to map out my horizons, (a considerable improvement from the balcony) and spend a few hours on something bright and high up in the sky. Still got a huge ass-backlog of pics from the old place to process, but I'll chip away at that eventually. Captured on June 11th, 2026 from a Bortle 6 zone.
Upgraded to the beyond 2e from my reverb G2 and I absolutely love it! Had to go through a couple different face plates since my eyelashes were touching the lenses, but their support was really good about getting a replacement/new face scan.
Imo the weakest area is the audio strap, especially coming from the G2 which has identical speakers to the index, but in the future I’ll probably look into the project beyondex strap to get the index speakers working with it
This is from stacking dozens of exposures and not rejecting out the trails. The satellite still moves for the few seconds between each exposure, creating the gaps
Essentially every stacking program have options to reject outlier pixels, such as the satellites. Hell even just averaging the pixels in an image stack without the outlier rejection would greatly diminish the streaks.
Honestly just seeing shadows look sharp was a weird experience too
I’ve been in 2 eclipses, and even fully knowing what was going to happen, the dumb lizard part of my brain was freaking out a little because the sun just disappeared at 2pm. It’s a wild experience
Having been with my wife since high school, the amount of time between “no fooling around” to “where are my grandchildren” was shockingly short.
CMOS, technically. It’s the ASI1600mm-pro
The teenage edgelord to bisexual 20 something pipeline is real
I’m rooting for it because if it actually plays out as planned, a certain CEO will fuck off to mars
Yeah about that…
https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/
Edge of the frame. Since stars are point sources of light any distortion from the optics, trailing from a long exposure, or even the atmosphere will distort them. IMO the center stars are what I’d consider acceptable for an untracked image, but then again I don’t really do much widefield astrophotography. It could also be your camera shifted slightly or from walking around near it?
There’s a number of YouTube channels of varying quality/expertise that are good for beginners, like AstroBackyard, Alaskan astro, cuiv the lazy geek to name a few. The cloudynights forum should If your a discord person, we do have one for this community (.gg/astrophotography) that’s pretty active with a lot of info that’s been gathered over the years, and it’s where I’ve learned most of what I know about the hobby.
Looks great for a first shot! If you took a couple more exposures you could stack them and use dark frames to help with the hot pixels. Also if you ever get a star tracker you could stop the lens down slightly to help with the distorted stars on the edges, but overall it looks pretty decent
How long of an exposure was this?
Good ol’ lithobraking
I've finally moved away from my bortle 9 balcony! Only had one clear night so far and used it to map out my horizons, (a considerable improvement from the balcony) and spend a few hours on something bright and high up in the sky. Still got a huge ass-backlog of pics from the old place to process, but I'll chip away at that eventually. Captured on June 11th, 2026 from a Bortle 6 zone.
Places where I host my other images:
Flickr | Pixelfed
Equipment:
TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
Orion Sirius EQ-G
ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding
Moonlite Autofocuser
Acquisition: 3 hours 2 minutes (Camera at half unity gain, -15°C)
L - 37x120"
R - 18x120"
G - 18x120"
B - 18x120"
Darks- 30
Flats- 30 per filter
Capture Software:
PixInsight Preprocessing:
BatchPreProcessing
StarAlignment
Blink
ImageIntegration per channel
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
Dynamic Crop
Multiscale Gradient Correction with MARS Project data
Luminance linear:
BlurXterminator (correct only)
ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
RGB Linear:
Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
BlurXTerminator (correct only)
HSV Repair
ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments
Nonlinear Processing
LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images
DeepSNR Noise reduction
Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc
NoiseXterminator for chrominance noise reduction
Invert > SCNR (masked) > Invert to remove this one very magenta colored star
More curves
Dynamic crop in on just the cluster
Resample to 75%
DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy
Annotation
https://lemmy.world/post/47908059
No hobby is safe
Upgraded to the beyond 2e from my reverb G2 and I absolutely love it! Had to go through a couple different face plates since my eyelashes were touching the lenses, but their support was really good about getting a replacement/new face scan.
Imo the weakest area is the audio strap, especially coming from the G2 which has identical speakers to the index, but in the future I’ll probably look into the project beyondex strap to get the index speakers working with it
Had the chance to do cadaver dissections and synovial fluid is some fascinating stuff! Slightly mucusy, but incredibly slick
This is from stacking dozens of exposures and not rejecting out the trails. The satellite still moves for the few seconds between each exposure, creating the gaps
Essentially every stacking program have options to reject outlier pixels, such as the satellites. Hell even just averaging the pixels in an image stack without the outlier rejection would greatly diminish the streaks.
My cat climbed inside the empty clothes hamper as soon as laundry was done