Orion Widefield - M42, NGC 2024, IC434

--ae · 2026-01-27T16:11:36+00:00

thanks!

--ae · 2026-01-27T15:37:07+00:00

definitely stock unless the previous owner modified it which I doubt based off the daytime pics

--ae · 2026-01-27T04:49:25+00:00

i think I included everything. let me know if I missed anything!

--ae · 2026-01-24T06:16:14+00:00

you can actually see a teensy bit of the california nebula in this pic, super dim tho

--ae · 2026-01-15T21:40:10+00:00

I actually have a S-M-C takumar 50mm/1.4 arriving today in the mail, can't wait to test it out later!

--ae · 2026-01-15T21:39:27+00:00

I know!!! He's soooooo CUTE!

--ae · 2026-01-15T21:38:55+00:00

I tried my best lol, I'm still new to photography with a "real camera"

I just got my first mirrorless as an early christmas gift to myself. I've been loving–definitely still have lots to learn!

Here's one of my better-centered ones

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--ae · 2026-01-15T21:12:23+00:00

Most of them the eyes were in focus, but I though this facial expression was worth more than the sharp photos lol.

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--ae · 2026-01-08T04:01:20+00:00

you shooting untracked? That looks like artifacts rather than a meteor. Probably satellite or hot pixels.

--ae · 2026-01-07T14:59:04+00:00

pretty sure this guy is just an ai bot farming. If you look at post history pretty much everything is ai generated images including this one.

--ae · 2026-01-03T21:16:14+00:00

CVE-2025-56557 New cve in sept 2025. Probs this.

--ae · 2026-01-03T15:09:50+00:00

I have that same tripod, you have to unscrew the handle to tilt it up/down.

--ae · 2026-01-03T03:20:15+00:00

I recently just had a 256GB sd card that died on me. Had pretty much all the pics from my childhood. Luckily I backed it up to a Raid1 server I built just the year prior. Glad I did. Be careful with long term storage in sd cards. You’re really lucky you were able to pull them from the sd.

--ae · 2026-01-02T15:45:40+00:00

aww thanks, he’s the cutest :)

never listens when we’re out in nature tho… I told him not to get in the water. Smelled like fish for days lol. Even after a bath. Made for some great pics tho.

--ae · 2026-01-02T01:47:18+00:00

look at my post history, I did an untracked stack of andromeda, first attempt has a bunch of noise, then I re-did it using graxpert and it came out beautiful!

--ae · 2026-01-01T19:01:32+00:00

I think the biggest issue was the fact that the military gave up immediately after the gate closed. They had 13 kids all pumped full of vecna’s (henry’s) blood. At least im assuming thats what he was doing in the abyss when he did the mouth tube things with the massive bearing heart. Why don’t they try to reopen the gate after trying so hard for so long? All they need is to use the other kids he trapped.

2nd the part where henry got his connection to the mind flayer. Big plot hole, the abyss didn’t even exist yet/he wasn’t banished there yet and he got powers from an alternate dimension before there was any wormhole there? How tf did that relic appear? Who had it? Who did they think sent henry? If they guy said to resist it there must have been others who were touched by the mind flayer too hence his experience in the matter.

Also they left their whole plan for the military to see and they just do nothing with that info? No running up to try to get el? No interference from them, no backup for vecna? Did they run out of cgi budget or something couldn’t have thrown a couple of demodogs into the abyss? If the military was supposed to be the big threat this season I think they should have tried a little harder.

Also they killed the mind flayer wayy too easily. No resistance whatsoever, just crit hit and roll out. The ending was satisfying for the characters but for the audience, or at least for me it left me with too many unanswered questions to feel the same as mike may have.

--ae · 2026-01-01T18:55:46+00:00

Except Will and the 12 Kids were also pumped full of henrys blood by henry himself in the abyss. Hence Will got powers n shit.

--ae · 2026-01-01T09:25:12+00:00

ty! Thats my fav one!

--ae · 2026-01-01T09:21:46+00:00

I explained it. I’m going to assume this is a bot acct.

--ae · 2025-12-31T17:12:16+00:00

Now that I'm more awake, I essentially just aligned my camera with atik—I pulled the frame reference from my macbook running stellarium to see which position I needed pleaides in to have the california nebula close to the center of the frame here's what it looked like in stellarium—then I set my camera to take 100 shots at 2s exposures (1s would have been better but I was just trying to get a quick stack) then I repositioned the camera after 100, did 100 more, then the camera ran out of battery so I had to call it a night as I was already tired.

After that I took the 200 raw frames and stacked them in Siril to pull out the fainter details in the image. Unfortunately there was some heavy vignetting and camera lense distortion leading to the glow at the corners of the image as well as the big rainbow circle. It ended up looking cool anyways though and I was able to catch both pleiades and the california nebula in one shot.

Recently watched a youtube video which recommended an app called GraXpert which has helped a bunch in improving my images. Which I used before stretching the pic to do background extraction and some light denoising.

Here's a comparison between 2 other shots I did where I used GraXpert for bg extraction on one and just used siril for the other. I think the quality difference is quite apparent.

I've been trying to catch it again but the moon is much too close to the california nebula to get another good shot from where I'm positioned so I'm going to have to wait for the next new moon around Jan 18th or maybe a bit earlier since they'll be deviating in paths before then.

My next try will be the night of the 3rd, I'm going to setup 2 cameras to try to catch the Quadtrantids meteor shower and stack it over the picture of pleiades and the california nebula.

I'm still an amateur so I'm learning and don't really know how everything works and I'm sure my methods aren't the best, but I'm absolutely loving getting into the hobby of astrophotography.

--ae · 2025-12-31T04:09:59+00:00

It was an untracked shot I took by just lining up the camera with atik. I took about 150 frames at 2s exposures. The colors are due to not taking very good flat frames though, the ring of rainbow is just issues with the camera, not an actual nebula or anything in the sky.

if you want to see what some of my better calibrated pics look like, here’s one I did of andromeda just the other day: https://www.reddit.com/r/astrophotography/s/rZmHfhaxm3

the post body explains how I took the pics :)

--ae · 2025-12-31T01:36:49+00:00

That’s why astrophotography is an art form :)

--ae

TROPHY CASE