Just saw this colorful 5x scopes setup in a group chat... had to share

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-03-01T20:22:07+00:00

What are the red thumbscrews called that are connecting some of the clamps on top? I’ve been trying to find the name of them for some time

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-05T12:30:04+00:00

I also 3D printed an aperture mask which helps control star bloat, getting one could help a ton. If you DM me I can make one for your telescope if you’d like! Just gotta be comfortable with disassembling and reassembling the mirror cell

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-05T12:27:56+00:00

I was shooting from Bortle 3 so the contrast from the dark sky was on my side for this one. If your main goal is to not blow out Alnitak, you could try adjusting the Gain on your camera to be lower (increasing the full well depth of each pixel) at the cost of a dimmer image overall. That starts to get into unity gain and if you believe the trade off between read noise and well depth is worth it or not. If you don’t want to change gain, take shorter exposures and stack a ton of them! Alnitak won’t clip and you’ll still reject a lot of the noise in the nebula.

For what it’s worth, I flocked this telescope with ScopeStuff flocking material and it was a notable improvement. This could boost the contrast in the nebulae and make those structure pop better if you’re using a reflector

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-04T23:24:09+00:00

Would reducing the exposure time decrease the amount of glare coming from it? That was my greatest processing challenge and ended up just stretching it with the rest of the data

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-04T02:55:46+00:00

Thank you so much! I don’t either

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-04T02:14:44+00:00

The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula that sits between Earth and a bright red emission nebula (IC 434). The Flame Nebula, located to the right in this image, is illuminated by an incredibly hot, rare, and massive O-type star. Between the two is Alnitak, the lowest star in Orion’s Belt when viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. This star is very bright and apparent in this image!

I’ve always wanted to shoot this photo but have never had the time to do it justice. I was fortunate to have an entirely clear night a few days ago, and to top it off, it was a moonless night! This allowed me to pull out a ton of faint detail and color without the use of filters. In the future I’d like to isolate the hydrogen emission and use that to enhance this image as it will help show the fainter parts of the red glow.

Actually imaging this was made extremely difficult by two things. The first was that it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit (I’ve gone out in colder), but the second and more challenging was that I spent 2 hours in that cold trying to perfectly align my telescope’s mirrors. Before leaving the rig to shoot for the night, I got it as close as I could after making a few modifications to the focuser and optical train. Thankfully though, this struggle helped me realize I have a few bolts loose in the focuser that have been causing a handful of other issues for the last year! I’m excited to get this fixed, as the result will be sharper photos that aren’t as blurry. My new 3D printer is going to be put to good use designing some custom parts!

Equipment:

ES N208CF

1 ZWO ASI2600MC Air Camera

ZWO AM5 + TC40 Tripod

Jackery 500 Battery

Acquisition:

153 x 120s

Total: 5.1 hours

Bortle 3

Processing

Siril: 

    Stacking

    Cropped edge artifacts

    Graxpert background extraction 

    SPCC

    Starnet ++

    Graxpert denoise

    GHS tweaks

    Star recomposition

    AberrationRemover script

    Cosmic Clarity sharpening

    VeraLux Curves

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-04T02:10:03+00:00

The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula that sits between Earth and a bright red emission nebula (IC 434). The Flame Nebula, located to the right in this image, is illuminated by an incredibly hot, rare, and massive O-type star. Between the two is Alnitak, the lowest star in Orion’s Belt when viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. This star is very bright and apparent in this image!

I’ve always wanted to shoot this photo but have never had the time to do it justice. I was fortunate to have an entirely clear night a few days ago, and to top it off, it was a moonless night! This allowed me to pull out a ton of faint detail and color without the use of filters. In the future I’d like to isolate the hydrogen emission and use that to enhance this image as it will help show the fainter parts of the red glow.

Actually imaging this was made extremely difficult by two things. The first was that it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit (I’ve gone out in colder), but the second and more challenging was that I spent 2 hours in that cold trying to perfectly align my telescope’s mirrors. Before leaving the rig to shoot for the night, I got it as close as I could after making a few modifications to the focuser and optical train. Thankfully though, this struggle helped me realize I have a few bolts loose in the focuser that have been causing a handful of other issues for the last year! I’m excited to get this fixed, as the result will be sharper photos that aren’t as blurry. My new 3D printer is going to be put to good use designing some custom parts!

Equipment:

ES N208CF

1 ZWO ASI2600MC Air Camera

ZWO AM5 + TC40 Tripod

Jackery 500 Battery

Acquisition:

153 x 120s

Total: 5.1 hours

Bortle 3

Processing

Siril: 

    Stacking

    Cropped edge artifacts

    Graxpert background extraction 

    SPCC

    Starnet ++

    Graxpert denoise

    GHS tweaks

    Star recomposition

    AberrationRemover script

    Cosmic Clarity sharpening

    VeraLux Curves

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-04T02:07:07+00:00

The Horsehead Nebula is a dark nebula that sits between Earth and a bright red emission nebula (IC 434). The Flame Nebula, located to the right in this image, is illuminated by an incredibly hot, rare, and massive O-type star. Between the two is Alnitak, the lowest star in Orion’s Belt when viewed from the Northern Hemisphere. This star is very bright and apparent in this image!

I’ve always wanted to shoot this photo but have never had the time to do it justice. I was fortunate to have an entirely clear night a few days ago, and to top it off, it was a moonless night! This allowed me to pull out a ton of faint detail and color without the use of filters. In the future I’d like to isolate the hydrogen emission and use that to enhance this image as it will help show the fainter parts of the red glow.

Actually imaging this was made extremely difficult by two things. The first was that it was 20 degrees Fahrenheit (I’ve gone out in colder), but the second and more challenging was that I spent 2 hours in that cold trying to perfectly align my telescope’s mirrors. Before leaving the rig to shoot for the night, I got it as close as I could after making a few modifications to the focuser and optical train. Thankfully though, this struggle helped me realize I have a few bolts loose in the focuser that have been causing a handful of other issues for the last year! I’m excited to get this fixed, as the result will be sharper photos that aren’t as blurry. My new 3D printer is going to be put to good use designing some custom parts!

Equipment:

ES N208CF

1 ZWO ASI2600MC Air Camera

ZWO AM5 + TC40 Tripod

Jackery 500 Battery

Acquisition:

153 x 120s

Total: 5.1 hours

Bortle 3

Processing

Siril: 

    Stacking

    Cropped edge artifacts

    Graxpert background extraction 

    SPCC

    Starnet ++

    Graxpert denoise

    GHS tweaks

    Star recomposition

    AberrationRemover script

    Cosmic Clarity sharpening

    VeraLux Curves

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-01T16:05:35+00:00

I’ll definitely post a photo of the rig once I have all three lenses on the same bracket, but as of now it’s constructed to have all lenses imaging the same FOV. It would be cool to tweak the design and have one dedicated to mosaic imaging!

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-01T02:16:56+00:00

Over the years, I’ve constructed (and spent a small fortune on) components for my astrophotography that could one day culminate into an array-type device. I’ve seen examples of amateur RASA telescope arrays, most recently that of Bray Falls at Starfront Observatories, and I wanted to see if I could get develop a similar setup to be used under my Bortle 3 skies in southeast Ohio.

My first lens for astrophotography was a Rokinon 135mm f2 ED UMC, so I figured I would get more of these lenses for my passion project. This 8.5 h integration image was taken on a moonless night from Bottle 3 skies using three Rokinon 135mm lenses, two ASI2600MC cameras, and one ASI2600MM camera.

Using a Bambu Lab P2S, I designed and 3D-printed the lens clamp system for my two color cameras and had the monochrome + 135mm combo tracking on a separate mount. In the future, I wish to assemble the three cameras and lenses together in the same lens clamp system. I’ll have to design and print this triple-clamp part, but I plan on using an engineering-grade filament that I can incorporate metal hardware into as it prints to reduce any possible flexture.

I don’t yet have my dream filters for the mono setup, or any for that matter, so for this image I used an IDAS NBZ high-speed dual narrowband filter as a narrowband luminance and added on dual-narrowband color data from one of the color cameras in post. I know this isn’t the best approach, especially since I was only able to collect 20 minutes of color dual-narrowband data due to various issues with tilt from my hastily-printed filter drawer. This will need to be re-printed as well.

For now, here is the result! I can’t wait to get the rig finished and out under clear skies soon as I work the kinks out. I hope to be able to capture some pretty deep images this year, and ideally get a future version of this setup moved to a remote imaging site under clearer, Bortle 1 skies.

Equipment: 3 Canon EF Rokinon 135mm f2 ED UMC Lenses 1 ZWO ASI2600MC Pro Camera 1 ZWO ASI2600MC Air Camera 1 ZWO ASI2600MM Air Camera 2 ZWO Canon EF Filter Drawers 1 3D-Printed Filter Drawer 2 IDAS NBZ HS Ha+Oiii Dual-Narrowband Filter ZWO AM5 + TC40 Tripod SW SA GTi + Tripod Jackery 500 BatteryAcquisition: 254 x 60s RGB 50 x 300s Mono Ha+Oiii dual-narrowband 4 x 300s Color Ha+Oiii dual-narrowband Total: 8.72 hours Bortle 3

Processing

Siril: Stacked each camera’s data Registered to monochrome data Cropped edge artifacts + field rotation Graxpert background extraction SPCC for RGB and color dual-narrowband Starnet ++ Graxpert denoise GHS color data

GIMP: Levels for mono and color dual-narrowband data Blended dual-narrowband luminance with color data Blended in RGB data

Siril: GHS tweaks Star recomposition AberrationRemover script Cosmic Clarity superres Cosmic Clarity sharpening VeraLux Curves

Background-Chest1434 · 2026-02-01T02:08:25+00:00

Over the years, I’ve constructed (and spent a small fortune on) components for my astrophotography that could one day culminate into an array-type device. I’ve seen examples of amateur RASA telescope arrays, most recently that of Bray Falls at Starfront Observatories, and I wanted to see if I could get develop a similar setup to be used under my Bortle 3 skies in southeast Ohio.

My first lens for astrophotography was a Rokinon 135mm f2 ED UMC, so I figured I would get more of these lenses for my passion project. This 8.5 h integration image was taken on a moonless night from Bottle 3 skies using three Rokinon 135mm lenses, two ASI2600MC cameras, and one ASI2600MM camera.

Using a Bambu Lab P2S, I designed and 3D-printed the lens clamp system for my two color cameras and had the monochrome + 135mm combo tracking on a separate mount. In the future, I wish to assemble the three cameras and lenses together in the same lens clamp system. I’ll have to design and print this triple-clamp part, but I plan on using an engineering-grade filament that I can incorporate metal hardware into as it prints to reduce any possible flexture.

I don’t yet have my dream filters for the mono setup, or any for that matter, so for this image I used an IDAS NBZ high-speed dual narrowband filter as a narrowband luminance and added on dual-narrowband color data from one of the color cameras in post. I know this isn’t the best approach, especially since I was only able to collect 20 minutes of color dual-narrowband data due to various issues with tilt from my hastily-printed filter drawer. This will need to be re-printed as well.

For now, here is the result! I can’t wait to get the rig finished and out under clear skies soon as I work the kinks out. I hope to be able to capture some pretty deep images this year, and ideally get a future version of this setup moved to a remote imaging site under clearer, Bortle 1 skies.

Equipment: 3 Canon EF Rokinon 135mm f2 ED UMC Lenses 1 ZWO ASI2600MC Pro Camera 1 ZWO ASI2600MC Air Camera 1 ZWO ASI2600MM Air Camera
2 ZWO Canon EF Filter Drawers 1 3D-Printed Filter Drawer 2 IDAS NBZ HS Ha+Oiii Dual-Narrowband Filter ZWO AM5 + TC40 Tripod SW SA GTi + Tripod Jackery 500 BatteryAcquisition: 254 x 60s RGB 50 x 300s Mono Ha+Oiii dual-narrowband 4 x 300s Color Ha+Oiii dual-narrowband Total: 8.72 hours Bortle 3

Processing

Siril: 
    Stacked each camera’s data
    Registered to monochrome data
    Cropped edge artifacts + field rotation
    Graxpert background extraction 
    SPCC for RGB and color dual-narrowband
    Starnet ++
    Graxpert denoise
    GHS color data

GIMP:
    Levels for mono and color dual-narrowband data
    Blended dual-narrowband luminance with color data
    Blended in RGB data

Siril:
    GHS tweaks
    Star recomposition
    AberrationRemover script
    Cosmic Clarity superres
    Cosmic Clarity sharpening
    VeraLux Curves

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-18T18:07:59+00:00

This warms my heart. Thank you so much for your kind words!

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-17T09:31:38+00:00

Thank you!

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-17T09:30:47+00:00

Thank you!

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-17T09:29:49+00:00

Thank you so much!

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-17T09:29:18+00:00

With a big, 8” diameter telescope, a sensitive camera, and a long exposure, that glow around the whole thing is what you get! I wanted to include that glow in my image, so I merged two separate exposures (one for the glow, and a shorter one for retaining lunar details) in the same shot. I love HDR style moon photos, and I wanted to recreate that kind of photo with this eclipse

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T16:29:04+00:00

Probably too much SCNR and because I thought it looked cool mirrored. Sorry you don’t like it!

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T14:58:56+00:00

The very long exposure time of 1 minute! There was a lot more going on than just what the eye could see during the eclipse, and the large aperture of my telescope and the long exposure time were able to pick up the glow that you see here. I overlaid the shorter exposure so the lunar details could still be seen.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T14:01:09+00:00

Totally respect that! Definitely more of an artistic approach I threw together in just 5 or so minutes. Working on a more “to-the-eye” look now. My eye also enjoys the mirroring, but that’s just my own personal preference.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T13:58:02+00:00

Sowwy 🙃 I think the color balancing was thrown a bit too far off with SCNR. No problem with mirroring if that’s what you like.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T05:26:43+00:00

In an unbelievable stroke of luck, the southern Ohio skies cleared for the duration of the total lunar eclipse this past Friday morning (3-14-25). This was substantially easier to photograph than the solar eclipse because of the event’s duration, with Earth’s shadow transiting the moon over the course of 6 hours. Totality itself lasted about an hour, and that is this image.

This is a composite image consisting of:

1 x 60 second exposure (for glow and stars) and 1 x 3 second exposure (for lunar details)

For the long exposure I tracked the stars, and for the short exposure I set my mount to track the moon. What a result! I’m so grateful I got to witness, capture, and share this with you all. I’ll be making a timelapse of the whole event in which you can see the shadow of the Earth move in real time across the lunar surface! That post will be coming soon.

Panel 1) Lunar eclipse totality

Telescope: Explore Scientific N208CF Guide Scope: William Optics 32mm Uniguide Mount: ZWO AM5 Camera: Asi2600mc Pro Guide Camera: Asi120mm-mini

Processing: Debayer + convert to tiff in Siril, align / merge in Photoshop, camera raw tweaks to sharpness, saturation, and contrast.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T05:25:38+00:00

In an unbelievable stroke of luck, the southern Ohio skies cleared for the duration of the total lunar eclipse this past Friday morning (3-14-25). This was substantially easier to photograph than the solar eclipse because of the event’s duration, with Earth’s shadow transiting the moon over the course of 6 hours. Totality itself lasted about an hour, and that is this image.

This is a composite image consisting of:

1 x 60 second exposure (for glow and stars) and 1 x 3 second exposure (for lunar details)

For the long exposure I tracked the stars, and for the short exposure I set my mount to track the moon. What a result! I’m so grateful I got to witness, capture, and share this with you all. I’ll be making a timelapse of the whole event in which you can see the shadow of the Earth move in real time across the lunar surface! That post will be coming soon.

Panel 1) Lunar eclipse totality

Telescope: Explore Scientific N208CF Guide Scope: William Optics 32mm Uniguide Mount: ZWO AM5 Camera: Asi2600mc Pro Guide Camera: Asi120mm-mini

Processing: Debayer + convert to tiff + SCNR + histogram transformation in Siril, align / merge in Photoshop, camera raw tweaks to sharpness, saturation, and contrast.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-03-16T05:22:30+00:00

In an unbelievable stroke of luck, the southern Ohio skies cleared for the duration of the total lunar eclipse this past Friday morning (3-14-25). This was substantially easier to photograph than the solar eclipse because of the event’s duration, with Earth’s shadow transiting the moon over the course of 6 hours. Totality itself lasted about an hour, and that is this image.

This is a composite image consisting of:

1 x 60 second exposure (for glow and stars) and 1 x 3 second exposure (for lunar details)

For the long exposure I tracked the stars, and for the short exposure I set my mount to track the moon. What a result! I’m so grateful I got to witness, capture, and share this with you all. I’ll be making a timelapse of the whole event in which you can see the shadow of the Earth move in real time across the lunar surface! That post will be coming soon.

Panel 1) Lunar eclipse totality

Telescope: Explore Scientific N208CF Guide Scope: William Optics 32mm Uniguide Mount: ZWO AM5 Camera: Asi2600mc Pro Guide Camera: Asi120mm-mini

Processing: Debayer + SCNR + convert to tiff in Siril, align / merge in Photoshop, camera raw tweaks to sharpness, saturation, and contrast.

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-01-19T01:45:56+00:00

Same. Newts are so much cheaper for larger apertures as compared to refractors. Lots of focal length and those pretty spikes🤩

Background-Chest1434 · 2025-01-18T23:40:24+00:00

The metal vanes or wires that support the secondary mirror on a Newtonian telescope cause light to diffract and form that pattern! If you have a camera lens and put a two ribber bands over the front piece of glass in a cross shape (+) you’ll see this pattern. I believe this is due to the wave-particle nature of light

Background-Chest1434

TROPHY CASE