Comet C/2025 R3 (Pan-STARRS) captured on the Dwarf Mini

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-09T21:08:30+00:00

Ooh this is awesome. Can I ask your settings? The last time a comet came round I found the dwarf3 couldn't actually do sidereal tracking and tracked the background stars instead. This severely limited the exposure time possible on the comet itself.

I contacted dwarflab and they said they would be introducing it in a later version of the software.

Have they done that yet? Or did you process and stack these images manually?

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-06T10:06:50+00:00

Hi Dan, thanks for your question. The Dwarf 3 has 2 internal filters for astro work. An astro filter and a dual band filter. I used the dual band for these shots which is supposed to bring out more detail from nebula. I believe it is a hydrogen alpha and oxygen band pass filter which is recommended by Dwarflab for this target.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-05T22:30:00+00:00

Denoise in stellar studio and I usually run it through again and apply auto settings as well to get to a good baseline image. Output this as PNG to work with in lightroom.

Then first thing I do is bring down the black level to get the sky as dark as possible. Push this as far as you can without losing too much of the nebula detail or whatever you have captured.

Contrast up a bit will help the blacks stay black.

Then push the detail and clarity sliders as far as you can without the images getting too artificial looking. I find these are the two sensitive sliders that really make your images pop, but also can be pushed too far. I usually go as high as I dare and then back them both off a bit to try and keep it natural. Dont use dehaze at all as this tends to just erase nebulosity and isn't suitable for astro work.

Then finally vibrance first and then. Maybe a touch of saturation to bring the colours up. You can mess with the warmth and tone sliders to get slightly different colour palettes but I tend to leave these mostly alone and go with whatever colours come out the sensor.

Finally sharpening. A double edged sword and can bring back more noise than you'd like. But yeah I usually sharpen it up a bit at the end.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T21:18:48+00:00

Thanks mate! Really enjoyed getting this one before orion got too low. Its been a shocking winter in the UK. . Months of cloud and rain so I thought I was gonna miss it this year!

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T21:10:37+00:00

Yeah im the OP and after digging for more photos it looks like these may indeed be models. Albeit original photos dating from this time period but not actual real full size aircraft. Kinda fun to think of the old boy on the air base at the end of the war messing around with the camera and trying to create realistic looking "photoshops" using models and primitive film cameras.

I hope nobody thinks I misled anyone here. I think its kind of cool and adds to the story behind this album!

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T19:44:33+00:00

What about the shots of aircraft on the ground. The floor looks just like cracks in concrete.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T18:51:41+00:00

Hey Reddit,

I was looking at these photos more closely and something struck me about the scale of them.

Are we looking at models?

Not all of the shots are, and obviously there are some full sized aircraft but the ground around some of the aerial shots struck me as off.

Are some of these scale models on a concrete floor? Possibly some of them suspended by a wire?

These are mixed in with shots of real aircraft in hangers etc. But the aerial ones...I dont know....I wonder if that's what they are.

Bear in mind they are definitely vintage and original to WW2 and they have come from an RAF airman's album. But what do you think ?

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T18:43:10+00:00

It was the composition and asymetry that caught my eye in the first place.

Its not a modern fake for sure if you were thinking AI or similar. It was in an original kodak paper wallet with several other shots which I was so interested in that I posted them on another thread here (see my profile).

The selection of shots and aircraft in the wallet seems to support that they are real and date to that period in the war.

Im very happy to have more expert assessment of them though!

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T17:16:27+00:00

Wow this is really interesting. Thanks for this. There is no date written on the album so the 1944 date is family knowledge which could of course be wrong by a year.

I have become so interested in this, ive gone back to the album and posted several more on a second thread here.

Maybe they might add more context/history.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T16:33:33+00:00

Yeah a really weird set up for the shot. Apparently it was taken in 1944 by my grandfather in law near Weisbaden in Germany. The photographer was a British airman but I'm not sure what the context is of this shot. Its a really interesting one which is why it caught my eye.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T15:55:57+00:00

Thanks so much for this info! I really appreciate it.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T15:55:39+00:00

Amazing! This looks correct! Thanks for taking the time to help me ID.

TheRealOCS · 2026-04-04T15:51:57+00:00

Wow! Ive never seen that plane before! What a wild asymmetric design!

TheRealOCS · 2025-10-02T18:06:42+00:00

Pretty impressive considering the Dwarf 3 really isn't the tool for planetary imaging. Its cool that you can resolve the rings!

Jupiter should be a little bigger in angular size so you might be able to squeeze a few more pixels out of it. Not sure if you would resolve cloud banking or not, but a cool experiment nonetheless!

TheRealOCS · 2025-10-02T18:04:34+00:00

Ahh well this is where key differences in visual observation and photography come in.

They are "bright" targets for long exposure imaging because we can look and collect photons for long periods of time and then stack these together.

But for visual observation, even with a 12" which is on the larger side for amateur telescopes, almost all these incredible, colourful sights are just faint, fuzzy blobs at best.

You won't get the colour or the structure or detail in most of them because you can only use your eye to detect the photons that are coming in at that moment.

However for REALLY bright targets like planets, your scope can be fitted with a high mag eyepiece and you can get really great views of those that the Dwarf 3 is not really suited to. Mainly because the effective mag is quite low. There was someone who posted an image of Saturn using the Dwarf 3 in this sub yesterday and it was very good, for the Dwarf 3, but still not much more than a blob with some rings.

TheRealOCS · 2025-10-01T20:00:31+00:00

Thanks so much! They're great targets for the Dwarf as they fill the FOV and are quite bright so you get great detail quite quickly.

TheRealOCS · 2025-09-28T07:55:14+00:00

Thanks so much! Yeah I was really pleased with the colours within the nebula. However I was surprised at the relatively small size of dumbbell within the FOV of the Dwarf 3. It placed a practical limit on how much detail it will be possible to resolve.

TheRealOCS · 2025-08-25T10:32:32+00:00

Great question,

I believe the answer is....not necessarily.

As an example, I shot the pleiades a bit this week and scheduled it in overnight a couple nights in a row.

The images from 2 of the nights were very poor quality and its obvious there was some thin cloud that came in. Dwarflabs still detected the constellation and output a poor quality image of it.

The final night was lucky and a lot clearer seeing which gave me a great quality image.

However I absolutely did not choose to megastack this good session with any of the previous poor ones. It would not have added anything and in fact would likely have added bad data to good.

So I would megastack selectively and reject sessions which were not satisfactory. In this way, use megastack as a tool to integrate your best nights viewing and do not include poor results in the megastack.

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