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 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…
The first time I pointed the DWARF 3 at M51 was August 14th last year. Eight and a half minutes, Alt-Az mode, gain 60, Astro filter. Both galaxies showed up and the…
At 4:22 in the morning my phone showed me something I couldn’t explain in my M13 Hercules Cluster image. 561 frames of M13, the Hercules cluster, nearly at zenith, 9.74 GB of…
What You Will Learn In this post I cover why DWARF 3 deep-sky images can look soft when zoomed in, what the telescope’s optics and image scale actually mean for resolution, how…
What You Will Learn In this post I share my February 2026 DWARF 3 image of M78 nebula (aka the friendly ghost nebula), a reflection nebula in Orion. I cover what makes…
Most people assume that serious lunar or moon photography requires a dedicated astronomy camera, a laptop running capture software, and a workflow that takes more time to set up than the session…
A 4 hour 50 minute integration of M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, from a Bortle 6 backyard using the DwarfLab Dwarf 3 in EQ mode with Astro filter and temperature-matched dark frames.
A 1 hour 46 minute DWARF 3 session on the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) using the Duo-Band filter under Bortle 6 skies. Documents the altitude constraint of imaging a southern target from…
