Spring is approaching, and targets visible from my south-facing balcony are about to disappear for the next few months.

One thing that is always there, though, is our Sun. Setting up my telescope takes longer than taking the actual pictures, which is nice.

#astrophotography #sun #space #sunphotography

Had some fun experiment with my data of M81 and M82, aka. Bode's Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy. I wanted to figure out how well I can combine different focal lengths. Back in April 2025, I captured 9 hours of exposure time in pure RGB at a focal length of 400 mm.

Someone on a community Discord server shot the same target at 250 mm with a similar camera, but in narrowband H-Alpha & OIII. He kindly made his data available to me.

#astrodon #astrophotography #space #astronomy

My next project I'd consider to be finished for now: M42, also known as the Orion Nebula. 24 hours of total exposure time between November and January.

Shot on my Askar FRA400 + ZWO ASI2600MC

Full resolution + details on my Astrobin profile: https://app.astrobin.com/i/7e57h4

#astrophotography #DeepSky #astronomy #Astrodon #nebula

Northern lights were photo-bombing my telescope's view of M 42 today

#astrodon #astrophotograpy #deepsky #AuroraBorealis

Did some initial tests to look into Pixinsight's HDRComposition to combine 60s and 180s exposures into one image to get some extra details in Orion's core.

So far it looks great after 8h total integration time. After extracting the stars for further editing, Pixinsight crashed and took the extracted stars with it.

Sharing it anyway

#astrodon #Astrophotography

Shot the Veil Nebula in the summer. I made multiple attempts at editing the photo and posted it a few months ago. I wasn't completely happy with the result, but I didn't want to start editing it for the 4th time.

This weekend, I stacked the raw data and edited it again using some new techniques I'd learned. This time, I was able to bring out the background much better. I'm much happier with this version.

#astrophotograpy #astrodon #astronomy

Found a gap between trees and buildings close to home which is where I placed my telescope to stare at yesterday's blood moon.

Only used my Seestar S50 since the big rig was too chunky to transport quickly.

Here's my kinda lucky shot. Getting photo-bombed by a plane

#astrophotography #Astrodon #Moon #bloodmoon #bloodmooneclipse #SeeStar #seestars50

Finally calling this project done. This is the Veil Nebula after 27h of exposure time, captured from my balcony in the city under Bortle 5/6 skies. A large portion of the expsure was taken during an 80-100% moon, so some of that data was probably less useful for the final stack.

Shot with a ZWO ASI2600MC and an Askar FRA400 using a 0.7x reducer to fit the whole nebula into a single frame. Next time, I'd like to try a two-panel mosaic fore more detail.

#astrophotograpy #astrodon #astronomy

Another attempt on shooting the #MilkyWay from my balcony.

I really need to move to an open field for this, since removing parts of my balcony or neighboring houses is such a hassle. Stitching together the foreground and background isn’t really an option either, because the field of view feels too narrow for my taste.

Tracked on a MoveShootMove NOMAD with a Fuji X-E4 and Samyang 12mm f/2.

#AstroPhotography #nightskyphotography #nightsky #photography

While my telescope was pointed towards the south collecting more light from the Veil Nebula, I went ahead and pointed my camera with a 12 mm lens towards the north-east trying to catch some meteors.

#astrophotography #astronomy #PerseidMeteorShower #space