I've finally moved away from my bortle 9 balcony! Only had one clear night so far and used it to map out my horizons, (a considerable improvement from the balcony) and spend a few hours on something bright and high up in the sky. Still got a huge ass-backlog of pics from the old place to process, but I'll chip away at that eventually. Captured on June 11th, 2026 from a Bortle 6 zone.
I've finally moved away from my bortle 9 balcony! Only had one clear night so far and used it to map out my horizons, (a considerable improvement from the balcony) and spend a few hours on something bright and high up in the sky. Still got a huge ass-backlog of pics from the old place to process, but I'll chip away at that eventually. Captured on June 11th, 2026 from a Bortle 6 zone.
Places where I host my other images:
Flickr | Pixelfed
Equipment:
TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
Orion Sirius EQ-G
ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope
ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding
Moonlite Autofocuser
Acquisition: 3 hours 2 minutes (Camera at half unity gain, -15°C)
L - 37x120"
R - 18x120"
G - 18x120"
B - 18x120"
Darks- 30
Flats- 30 per filter
Capture Software:
PixInsight Preprocessing:
BatchPreProcessing
StarAlignment
Blink
ImageIntegration per channel
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)
Dynamic Crop
Multiscale Gradient Correction with MARS Project data
Luminance linear:
BlurXterminator (correct only)
ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
RGB Linear:
Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
BlurXTerminator (correct only)
HSV Repair
ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments
Nonlinear Processing
LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images
DeepSNR Noise reduction
Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc
NoiseXterminator for chrominance noise reduction
Invert > SCNR (masked) > Invert to remove this one very magenta colored star
More curves
Dynamic crop in on just the cluster
Resample to 75%
DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy
Annotation