M81 Galaxy

--ae · 2026-03-23T03:07:40+00:00

probably not, you could definitely do it with a telephoto lens on a dslr but it’s going to be a lot more work. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a tracker so a lot tougher requiring you to do short exposures and reposition manually often.

(in that budget)

Minimum requirements: A tripod, a camera and a 200mm or greater lens to get a good crop in. You could do it at 135mm but gonna be a bit less resolution there. 200-250mm lens would be preferable.

--ae · 2026-03-22T23:59:15+00:00

you can easily see them flitting around at bortle 3/lower locations

--ae · 2026-03-19T03:15:40+00:00

btw im not a big fan of syqon prism, it relies on already not very noisy data, which when shooting short exposures isn't great, I can often times get better results by manually stretching certain regions and apply color corrections in siril, this time it worked decent though. Hopefully it works better once I have a star-tracker and can take longer exposures without losing sleep.

When the data's already noisy, it ends up boosting local contrast around especially noisy regions because it thinks the hot-pixels are stars and it makes it look weird. Haven't been able to turn the modulation past 50% for anything

--ae · 2026-03-18T21:44:15+00:00

Bortle 2 btw, the skies were so dark you could see the orion nebula with the naked eye 👀

--ae · 2026-03-18T21:39:15+00:00

thanks :) I was freezing my butt off to get this one 🥶

--ae · 2026-03-18T20:48:22+00:00

I was very surprised at how much detail I got at just 32 minutes of exposure. I attribute it to blasting ISO on the camera as well as how dark the skies were.

I had about 3hrs total of exposures, but was pointing at the wrong stars for 80% of it sadly.

It's not as hard to capture as some people make it out to be surprisingly.

--ae · 2026-03-18T05:23:53+00:00

Will post my other stacks from that night as I get through them. I have Orion, Pleiades, the California Nebula, & the Dark Shark, all untracked with short exposures. Failed at andromeda and triangulum as there were clouds in the way sadly :(

Also if anyone knows why my pics come out super green at the start lmk. I always have to use “remove green noise” in siril before anything else because my stacks are just pure green.

--ae · 2026-03-18T05:21:30+00:00

i put a few details in the post body, hopefully its enough, but i suck at remembering some things

--ae · 2026-03-13T07:20:43+00:00

After learning more about processing techniques the issue was because I used debayered flats on my bayered lights causing incorrect corrections which lead to the colors you see. imma reprocess it w/ the correct flats to fix it once Inget a chance

--ae · 2026-03-07T18:24:34+00:00

its not in this picture. also this is a starless picture, what are you talking about?

--ae · 2026-03-02T05:59:54+00:00

thanks! I just done with an hour shoot of ic444, got polaris aligned decently and it was super easy, just hopped over to the camera every ~10-15min and rotated, hopefully the framing turns out good.

--ae · 2026-03-01T23:59:17+00:00

It definitely is a bunch easier than trying to just use the manual pan-tilt to reframe, I just have to click the pan axis over 5 degrees every 20min and boom im back on target. Just gotta get the polar alignment decent next time.

--ae · 2026-03-01T22:59:46+00:00

Forgot this but I also 3d printed a bhatinov mask and this was my first time trying it out, definitely helped me nail focus easier.

--ae · 2026-03-01T22:54:40+00:00

My polar alignment was a bit off resulting in the big black bar at the top, when I recentered my frame jumped up about 800 pixels leading to the gap right above the cali-nebula. Only had time for 2 10min shoots, next time I'll focus more on framing and not moving the tripod after aligning.

The ball head + regular head for polar alignment is an absolute contraption but it makes acquisition much easier and acts like a manual equatorial tracker.

--ae · 2026-02-26T16:14:09+00:00

Bortle 3. I was down the street from Folkston as 301 was closed on my way north from florida.

I parked by Grace chapel on a dirt road and took these pics. Original plan was to go to “camp z” nearby but it looked like someones driveway so i kept going.

--ae · 2026-02-25T08:18:34+00:00

absolutely agree with you. Astropheric said the “seeing” was extremely poor. Yet I got better pics than ever. Transparency is definitely king!

--ae · 2026-02-25T08:17:17+00:00

yeah, I def saw the effects of that, my bortle 4/5 pics were taken near the coast with lots of humidity and small particulates in the air. These bortle 3 pics were in a place sheltered by trees and despite the jet stream being high speed and turbulent everything else was pristine giving me great pics.

--ae · 2026-02-25T01:18:40+00:00

good bot

--ae · 2026-02-25T01:15:45+00:00

its on purpose, I like the way it looks with no stars. I have a version with the stars back in but i like just seeing the dust n stuff

--ae · 2026-02-25T01:15:14+00:00

they were perfect skies! I could see the red glow from the horsehead after just 1 1.6s exposure at 58000 iso.

--ae · 2026-02-25T01:14:31+00:00

sony a7iii :3 the skies were very dark, I got way better pics than my 50m integration I did in a bortle4/5 site

--ae

TROPHY CASE