PRACTICAL TIPS · REAL IMAGING EXAMPLES
Find settings to try, processing techniques to learn, and real sessions to guide your next night under the stars. Explore DWARF 3 advice and our expanding Draco coverage.
Settings & Calibration · Processing · Imaging Sessions · Draco
The Elephant’s Trunk Nebula, IC1396, is a dark cloud with dozens of new stars condensing inside it right now, lit along one edge by a neighboring star system bright enough to set…
The Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888, is a shell of glowing gas being shaped right now by a star passing through one of the shortest, rarest stages in a massive star’s life, and…
Our own galaxy is the one target I could never actually see. From my Bortle 6 backyard the Milky Way is barely a rumor, a faint brightening low over Cygnus on the…
I had 21.5 hours of data on the Squid Nebula and a decision to make: keep shooting it, or give up and point the scope somewhere else. Ou4 is one of the…
Three DWARF 3 solar sessions across five days: an exposure bracket at gain 0, an internal filter experiment, and a sunspot complex that dissolved before this post went up. Settings, science, and…
The light in this image of the Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946) left its source about 25.2 million years ago. When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, those photons had already…
I ran 1h 14m on NGC 4565, the Needle galaxy C38, mostly as a check before committing real time to my hunt for the Squid Nebula. The Needle galaxy is the kind…
The giant squid (the deep sea creature, not the squid nebula) spent most of a century as the animal everyone knew was down there and almost nobody could photograph. There were beaks…
The plan for the week was the Squid, but the Squid needs darkness and it needs hours, more hours than one clear-but-not-clear-for-long night was going to give me. So I pointed the…
A one-night DWARF 3 session on the Leo Triplet from Bortle 6 skies. 278 subs at 60 seconds, gain 50, Astro filter, 4h 38m stacked. All three galaxies resolved, the NGC 3628…
