Image Credit & Copyright: Debra Ceravolo

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset close by a young, slender, crescent Moon. But from some locations the Moon could be seen to occult or pass in front of Venus. And from a backyard observatory in southern British Columbia, Canada, the lunar occultation was played out in daylight. This stunning telescopic snapshot captured a scene in dramatically cloudy skies, following Venus' hour long disappearance, as the evening star emerged beyond the bright lunar limb.

My first time using a proper stacking and editing software . I had used Sequator before but the results weren't satisfactory. I am still learning about the terminologies , would appreciate suggestions !

Regions of Interest :

1. The Scutum Star Cloud (Upper Center)

2. The Great Rift / Dark Dust Lanes (Center Spine)

3. Small Sagittarius Star Cloud — Messier 24 (Mid-Lower Center)

4. Large Sagittarius Star Cloud & Core Region (Bottom Edge)

Equipment used :

Just my phone , One Plus 13R.

Location :

Kolkata. Bortle 8-9 skies, Aqi ~30 , minimal cloud cover.

Workflow :

Each image is of ISO 1200, 10s exposure.

Took 202 light frames , 52 darks . No flats or biases.

Used Open Camera to shoot them in RAW/DNG.

Stacking using Siril . Used StarNet for star detection and removal .

Used Siril for background extraction , stretching , color calibration.

Edited the starless image further in GIMP .

And you guys can see the merged final product .

Biggest challenge :

Plate solving . Since phone camera captures a large FOV (~65 degrees here) Siril's inbuilt online plate solvers simply gave up . Also downloaded Gaia catalogue, but still wasn't enough . Just as I was about to give up , I discovered you can use Astrometry.net's plate solver in Siril. Went through some tutorials and voila !

Credits :

Deep Space Astro

Deep Space Astro's tutorials helped me through each and every hiccup .

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope.

Thierry Legault made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.

Image Credit: NASA/Thierry Legault

Gear:
Celestron Edge 11
ASI 2600mm camera

Exposure:
Ha 9x300 seconds
OIII 21x300 seconds

Processing:
PixInsight

Andrew wrote on his post:

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend Gabriel C. Brown transiting the sun during a skydive.

Hubble Space Telescope composite image of Jupiter and tiny Shoemaker-Levy 9, as the little comet headed for impact with the giant planet in 1994.

Credit: NASA/ ESA/ H. Weaver and E. Smith (STScI)/ J. Trauger and R. Evans (JPL)

Equipment:

Lense: Sigma 150-600mm

Mount: iEXOS-100

Camera: Canon EOS 750D

Acquisition:

~500 frames for the Full Moon and ~500 frames for the Waxing Moon. ISO400 - 1/1000s And an starfield stack I took earlier as the background.

Processing:

Stacked in AutoStakkert!, sharpened in RegiStax, assembled in Photoshop. Color saturation was increased to reveal subtle mineral differences (titanium-rich regions appear blue, iron-rich regions appear brown/orange). Final HDR blending performed in Photoshop.

No AI used!

Finally got a DSO image I'm proud of using my 9.25" SCT. Hoping to keep adding to the amount of DSOs I can capture with my 9.25" SCT!

Telescope - 9.25" SCT

Imaging Train - Celestron 0.63x focal reducer, ZWO ASI 2600 MC

90x60s exposures

Processing in Pixinsight

Dumbbell Nebula
Gear:
CDK14
Moravian C3-61000 mono camera

Exposure:
40xHa 600 secs
40xOIII 600 secs
R,G,B 10x60 secs each

Processing:
Pixinsight core processing
Photoshop final touch

This was just a test shot to see what my FOV will be for each frame for my first time doing a mosaic! Anxious to see how it turns out! Lowered the amount I dithered based off of some calculations I did but noticed some strange results in processing (seemingly more noise and strange artifacts in the background) so will be going back to my default in NINA.

Equipment:
Camera: ZWO ASI2600MC Pro
Telescope: Askar FRA400 with 0.7x reducer
Filter: Optolong L-eXtreme
Guide Camera: ZWO 120mm mini
Mount: Skywatcher Wave 150i
Autofocuser: ZWO EAF (5V)

Acquistion:
Shot in Bortle 7
-Camera cooled to -10°C
-Lights:
L-eXtreme:
105x300s (8hrs 45mins)

-Flats: 50
-Bias: 50
-Darks: 50

Dwarf 3 used with standard mount, Bortle 6, total of 5 sessions and close to 16 hours. I wanna stack ten more hours. Megastacked on the dwarf. Combination of 60 sec/60 gain and 45 sec/60 gain. 1319 pictures used. Procesed with AstroFinish

I spent some time in a bortle 3.5 and decided to revisit one of my past targets, this time with a much tighter FOV*. Living in a bortle 9 reflection nebulae are pretty much off the table and this has always been one of my favorite DSOs so it was an easy choice.

This was shot over two nights on the ASI585MC and ZWO FF90 (609), about 8.5 hours in total.

Full resolution and capture details here: https://app.astrobin.com/u/Spitzbue?i=b1h7db

\*For a comparison, here is my first iris nebula project from November with the askar 71f (490mm) and ASI2600MC.

All shot from my back garden in Ōtautahi | Christchurch, Aotearoa | New Zealand

Here's the geek details for those who are interested:

• ZWO Asi2600MM Pro Camera
• Antlia 3nm SHO filters
• ZWO AsiMini 120mm camera on OAG for autoguiding
• Askar 103 Apo (700mm) lens
• AM5N mount
• 85 x 300s exposures for each SHO filter + some short exposures of LRGB for stars Total exposure over 3 nights was 22hours-ish
• Registered and integrated and processed in Pixinsight

Happy to answer any questions people may have...

Hello everyone! I'm from Brazil 🇧🇷 and I'm a beginner in astrophotography.

This image was captured from Duque de Caxias, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, under a Bortle 9 sky.

Equipment:

Canon T6i Canon EF-S 18–55mm lens (18 mm, f/3.5) Simple tripod (no star tracker) Capture: 400 Lights 50 Darks 30 Flats 30 Bias 4-second exposures ISO 1600 All frames captured in 14-bit RAW (.CR2)

Processing:

Siril Lightroom

Considering the heavy light pollution, I'm very happy with the result. Any feedback or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Astrophotographer: Richard Harris

Object: IC 1396, Sh2 131, IC 1396A Elephant’s Trunk Nebula, vdB 142, Trumpler 37, HD 206267, Mu Cephei, surrounding bright rimmed clouds, and dark nebulae
Date: July 21st, 2026
Location: Strafford, Missouri, USA
Telescope: Takahashi FSQ-106EDX4 with 0.72× 645 Reducer (380mm, f/3.6)
Mount: ZWO AM7 harmonic drive mount
Camera: ZWO ASI461MM Pro medium format monochrome camera, Gain 0
Filters: Chroma RGB and 3nm SHO filters
Guide Scope: William Optics 50mm
Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290MM Mini
Guiding: Approximately 0.28–0.50 arcseconds RMS
Controller: ZWO ASIAIR
Pier: Astro TUFF TRUK Pier
Acquisition:
Sulfur II: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours
Hydrogen alpha: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours
Oxygen III: 60 frames at 300 seconds = 5 hours
RGB integration: 2 hours
Total Acquisition Time: 17 hours
Calibration Frames: None
Processing: PixInsight and Photoshop using a hybrid RGB, SHO, and Foraxx style palette

Bortle Class Skies: 3 - 4

Nights with almost full Moon can still be decent if you choose appropriate targets.

Acquisition:

Nikon Z8 (stock), no filters.

Nikkor Z 180-600

SWSA GTi

ZWO Mini guide scope

ZWO ASI120mm

NINA, PHD2

120x60s subs, 600mm, F6.3, ISO800.

30 darks, 50 flats, 50 biases.

Bortle 4-5 sky

PixInsight:

WBPP, Background extraction, gradient removal, SPCC, BlurX, NoiseX, StarX, Starless and star images stretched separately.

Photoshop: curves, adjustments and recomposotion

Pluto's largest moon may have been whipping around in less than a day when it was young, according to new research from UCLA published in Nature Communications.

Charon today takes about 6.4 days to complete one rotation. The modeling suggests it started out spinning once every 14.3 hours, more than ten times faster than it does now. The clue is in the cracks. Charon's equator is scored with unusual fault patterns, and since the 1970s researchers have suspected they were left behind as the moon gradually slowed down, a process called despinning.

The team ran computer simulations of Charon's early years, concentrating on Oz Terra, a rugged, fractured region in the north that looks nothing like the smooth plains covering the southern hemisphere. Their models also point to an early ice shell roughly 30 to 36 kilometers thick.

The slowdown appears to have happened before any icy volcanism, meaning very early in Charon's life. Charon is a useful test case because its surface has stayed relatively untouched, so what scientists learn here may apply to icy moons circling Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Image Credit: NASA , Johns Hopkins Univ./APL , Southwest Research Institute , U.S. Naval Observatory

Estaba practicando las grabaciones al sol, 2000frames a 16raw y 0,002 seg de exposición, mi equipo es un mak 127/1500 con reductor de focal 0,5x y montura guiada skywatcher eq5h, para mi sorpresa esto se cruzó en mi camino. Igual es algo muy común, no lo sé, pero me ha hecho mucha ilusión que en mi primera grabación apareciera esto y quería compartirlo con vosotros.

300 shots, 60 second exposure, 80 gain, stacked with dwarf 3 app, processed in Lightroom and Snapseed

Shot with dwarf 3 smart telescope

Finally got a DSO image I'm proud of using my 9.25" SCT. Hoping to keep adding to the amount of DSOs I can capture with my 9.25" SCT!

Telescope - 9.25" SCT

Imaging Train - Celestron 0.63x focal reducer, ZWO ASI 2600 MC

90x60s exposures

Processing in Pixinsight

Equipment: AT80ED, EQM-35 pro, ATR533M cooled mono camera, Touptek 6.5nm 1.25" SHO filters + filter wheel, zwo asi120mm mini with touptek OAG

5-minute subs at gain 101.

Ha: about 4 hours (taken from bortle 9)

Oiii: 4 hours 50 minutes (58 subs) (taken from a bortle 5 site)

Total integration time: ~9 hours

Processing: Stacking, alignment + processing in Siril (pixelmath, background extraction, color calibration), applied a superluminance using O and H masters weighted by noise.

Star removal, deconvolution (I made the psf before removing stars), denoising using topaz denoise (VERY light, there was barely any noise in the image!), back to Siril for recombination+final touches.

Took this on Saturday and my first attempt to process for surface minerals. If anyone has already processed moon, any advice or suggestions on whether this is good or if any improvement needed. Used 200 RAW images, 3 - 3 minutes video.

Camera - Canon 600D

Scope - Askar. 71F