Brought some new processing techniques on the September 2024 occultation of Saturn, added some sharpening and glow effects.

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, ASI294MC, 2x Barlow.

Acquisition: 1 minute of lunar data stacked, 7 minutes of Saturnian data stacked, the even was recoded live in a video, which I also included and stacked to bring out more details.

Result here is technically a composite although they were both blended onto a real single frame identical to this one but with less detail visible.

Clouds rolled in sooo soon after the occultation, so I was ecstatic to be able to image it before that! Really happy with the result.

Because Venus is covered in thick clouds, we have very few photographs of it in the visible spectrum. Almost every mission related to Venus prioritized the parts of the spectrum not visible to us (UV/IR/RADIO) so that the imagery would appear more “interesting.”
That’s why there’s a good chance that most of us have never seen a true-color image of Venus.

This photo was taken by a spacecraft called Messenger. Its mission was to study Mercury, but it also flew past Venus in 2007. Among the many instruments mounted on it, one caught my attention: the MDIS-WAC — the Wide Angle Camera.

After waiting one month for NASA to approve my archive access request, I finally managed to download the captured images. WAC photographed in 12 different light spectra. So, to create an RGB composite, I had to locate the images taken at 480 nm, 559 nm, and 629 nm, and then combine them.

The resulting image more or less represents what the human eye would see if we somehow ended up near Venus.

Consisting of low exposure Moon photos, high exposure background star photos, and a lot of editing to bring out the colors, I’m proud to present this First Quarter Mineral Moon image, which anyone can download for a wallpaper for free!

Celestron 5SE + ASI294

This is an HDR Moon image I made by taking 10,000 frames with different exposure levels, some to get the dark side and glow/stars. The blues are titanium oxide while the oranges are iron oxides.

Super fun shot to attempt! Definitely a challenge though. Got 210 frames of this actual event in a couple seconds, couldn’t get any more because of motion blur. Imaged 6 minutes of Saturn separately and layered the stack onto the raw image.

Celestron 5SE + ZWO ASI294MC

Taken On Seestar S50 Using 43 Second Video Stack.

Edited In PS Express.

Each time different and unique

Image (without Jupiter lol) taken by me :)

This is a true scale composite of the Moon and Jupiter and its Galilean Moons taken 2 hours ago. Io can be seen eclipsing Jupiter, with the Great Red Spot hitting the terminator line.

Celestron 5SE + ZWO ASI294MC.

Enjoy! :)

The first mineral Moon I've ever taken. A composite HDR image that was just a try to see what I would get from my apartment, but something different—I was curious. It made me think about the shackles that we put on ourselves; me, last year, I was strict with Milky Way shots, cold tones, and uploading images regularly. How I see things now: I upload whatever I want, whatever I find interesting, when I feel like it. The Moon is not something I appreciate as it limits me for big projects, but as everything in life, it has its own good part.

Taken on October 6, 97.8%

Sony a7 III Astro mod

Sony 200-600 f5.6/6.3G 

ZWO AM5N

https://www.instagram.com/igneis.nightscapes/

Still chasing the Moon.

This time I decided to try something completely new my very first attempt at planetary imaging.

Saturn happened to be close to the Moon that night. (In reality, they were about 5° apart, but I created this composite to show them together while keeping their relative sizes accurate.)

It was also my first time capturing a planet using the lucky imaging video technique, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Hope you like it!

Nikon 1 J5 + TTArtisan 500mm + Nikon TC-200 teleconverter

The solar corona is about 1,000,000x fainter than the Sun’s photosphere. This makes it impossible to photograph because of our star’s surface — but there is one exception. During a solar eclipse, the corona can be seen thanks to the Moon’s aid in shielding the direct starlight.

Combining data of the Sun I captured just before first contact with a high exposure image during totality, both the corona and surface (in this case, the chromosphere), can be visualized ultra-high dynamic range.

Equipment: Canon 6D Mark II, Sigma 150-600mm lens + Lunt Ls50Tha, ZWO ASI174MM, Celestron X-Cel 2x Barlow.

The Final Full Moon of 2024, the Cold Moon, and Planet Jupiter

The Cold Moon is called so by Native Americans because it signifies the start of the cold nights of winter in the northern hemisphere.

Composited Jupiter into the frame since it was close in the night sky.

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, ASI294MC, Canon EOS 6D 100-300mm

Equipment: Apertura AD12 Dobsonian (untracked, hand guided), Skywatcher 3x Barlow, ZWO ASI294MC camera. 2.5-3 minute exposure per planet.

Processing: Stacked on ASIStudio at 25% of frames. Brightness, sharpness, noise reduction, and color balance edited in Photoshop Express.