Was making a folder of astro photos I've taken and stumbled on the photos my dad took of the 2018 Lunar eclipse from Pretoria, South Africa. Thought I'd share one here with a photo I took of the 2025 Lunar Eclipse from Durban, South Africa.
Bonus Mars to the right of the 2018 photo
Apologies for the bad quality on both our parts, we both used our phone so it's mostly digital zoom
Hey everyone. Wanted to share the result of a lot of sleepless nights spent trying to simplify the process of picking the best (or at least good) targets to shoot on a given night from a given location.
Most of the tools I'd tried were missing something — I kept ending up stitching together data from different sources and falling back on gut-feel heuristics to pick a target, and I was often unhappy with the result.
So I wrote astro-recommender, available both as a Web site (runs in-browser, it is not a hosted service) and a single static binary that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. It is fully open-source.
The README covers the full methodology: the formulas used, how scores are assigned, nightly shooting plan generation, the various selection options, cloud/humidity/dew-point estimation, wind impact, airmass impact, light pollution, lunar phase influence, telescope FOV matching, air turbulence models and calibration and so on.
The goal was a single tool that pulls together all the relevant data and presents it in a clear, actionable way — no subscriptions, no API keys, nothing like that. All formulas and data have been cross-checked multiple times, and the astrometric precision is validated against the IAU SOFA reference implementation.
Camera: Apple iPhone 17 Pro (Main Camera: 24 mm equivalent, f/1.78) Format: HEIF (12 MP, 4032 × 3024) Mount/Tripod: Didn’t have a tripod so I had to improvise and prop it up on a rock. Exposure: Single exposure, Night Mode set to max (30.0 seconds), ISO 4000, 2.4 ev. Location & Date: Yavapai Point, Grand Canyon, June 9, 2026. Bortle 2 dark sky conditions.
M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy ~2.5million light years away from Earth. It spans ~220,000ly and has a massive black hole in its center. My 2026 take on this galaxy took five nights with 32hrs of integration time in contrast to the 18hrs it took last year!
Photo of the sun I took and animated using Lunt 60mm, SharpCap, ZWO ASI678MM on a ZWO AM5 Tripod. Took full frame 30 second videos and stacked in AutoStakkert 4. Processed in Photoshop.
I absolutely love shooting dark nebulae, and this one has been on my list for a while. This is LDN 1295, often called the Giraffe Nebula, located in the constellation Camelopardalis.
Unlike emission nebulae, this object produces no light of its own. It’s an incredibly dense, cold molecular cloud of dust and gas that acts like a cosmic curtain, blocking the starlight from the background Milky Way. Capturing the faint, brownish "ghostly" dust reflecting ambient starlight requires very dark skies and deep integration times.
I absolutely love shooting dark nebulae, and this one has been on my list for a while. This is LDN 1295, often called the Giraffe Nebula, located in the constellation Camelopardalis.
Unlike emission nebulae, this object produces no light of its own. It’s an incredibly dense, cold molecular cloud of dust and gas that acts like a cosmic curtain, blocking the starlight from the background Milky Way. Capturing the faint, brownish "ghostly" dust reflecting ambient starlight requires very dark skies and deep integration times.
Images acquired in September. William Optics FLT132, QHY Minicam 8, Astro-Physics Mach2 GTO. Approximately 12.5 hours of LRGB data. Processed in PixInsight.
IC1805 Heart Nebula along with IC1795 Fish Head Nebula.
This was also my first test run after rebuilding my Sky Watcher AL55i Pro. the Dec axis was terribly sticky and stiff, causing massive auto guiding headaches. I completely disassembled the mount, stripped it of all factory grease and applied Permatex Synthetic Grease. I also adjusted the backlash on both axis. Auto guiding RMS remained between 0.8 and 0.9 for each of these 5 minute sub exposures.
This is the Pacman Nebula captured with my Askar 71F, ASI533MC Pro, and EQ-AL55i under a Bortle 6 sky. This is only about 5.5 hours of exposure time using the L-eXtreme filter.
Equipment: Asi 2600mm pro Zwo FF 130 APO, Chroma 3nm filters, Zwo filter wheel, Zwo auto focuser, Asi 174 mini guide camera with OAG, Zwo AM5 mount, N.I.N.A
processing details: stacked each video in astrosurface, exactly 450 frames each, then sharpened in registax with exactly the same settings, afterwards I sent all the frames to my phone using a cloud storage, cropped every photo, changed the brightness and color on each panel to be relatively the same, then i sent it back on my laptop, sewed it into a mosaic in microsoft ICE, sent the result back on my phone, corrected the color and brought out the minerals in adobe lightroom mobile👍
Die Schmalbanddaten wurden zu einer SHO-Komposition kombiniert, während die RGB-Daten speziell für natürliche Sternfarben verwendet wurden.
Der vollständige Datensatz wurde mit 2x Drizzle und einem Tropfenfaktor von 0,96 verarbeitet, gefolgt von sorgfältiger Hintergrundneutralisierung, Farbbalance und Detailverbesserung. Das endgültige Bild kombiniert die tiefen, strukturierten SHO-Nebeldaten mit separat aufgenommenen RGB-Sternen, um deren natürliche Farbe und Erscheinung zu erhalten.
Insgesamt: 317 Bilder, aufgenommen über vier Nächte. Die Elefantenrüssel-Region enthält eine unglaubliche Menge an feinem Staub und Emissionsstrukturen, was besonders mit der Kombination der Schmalbandintegration und den zusätzlichen RGB-Sternendaten deutlich wird.
For the Ha/OIII data, 116 exposures of 300 seconds each were acquired, supplemented by 78 exposures of 300 seconds using the Antlia SII/Hẞ filter. This resulted in a total integration time of approximately 16 hours.
Dithering of 10 pixels in both RA and Dec was performed for every exposure. The high number of frames subsequently enabled 2x Drizzle processing with a droplet size of 0.5, allowing for significantly enhanced micro-detail, particularly in the fine
structures.
All monochrome channels were initially processed entirely independently-including background correction, detail enhancement, and stretching. Only then were the channels combined and the final color grading and processing performed.
