A few nights that worked
A selection from the finished-image archive. Open any frame for the full version.
The clearest night of the month usually happens while I am doing something else. That is most of what Alberta has taught me about astrophotography.
I enjoy the technical achievement of capturing the light more than I enjoy producing a polished final image, so I collect far more frames than I ever show anyone.
The observatory
The setup lives in a SkyShed POD dome under skies of roughly Bortle 4–5. Local light pollution is manageable. Weather has been the larger obstacle for the past few years.
In current use:
- Explore Scientific ED102-CF refractor
- William Optics RedCat 51
- ZWO ASI2600 and ASI294MC cameras, among other camera setups
- HEQ5, HEQ6-R Pro, and AVX tracking mounts
- Narrowband and colour filter sets
- A well-loved Celestron 102GT on its original mount for visual observing
Most of the imaging time goes to nebulae, usually monochrome capture through filters. The fine structure in a good monochrome frame is already enough to make a familiar object look new.
A night of capture
KStars and the ASIAIR run most of the session. Once everything is aligned, focused, guided, and behaving, the setup is genuinely pleasant to use.
Getting there is the hobby. Tracking, focus, filter changes, cable movement, mount behaviour, temperature, and target timing all have to cooperate on the same night, and the equipment becoming more reliable over the years has mostly given the weather a clearer field.
I like time-lapsing an entire night of capture. The stacked result compresses the session into one frame; the time-lapse keeps the sky turning, the target drifting, and the observatory working for hours.
Processing
PixInsight handles most of the processing, with the usual stacking tools along the way.
It is my least favourite part of the hobby. I have drifted towards leaving results in monochrome rather than forcing every filter set into a finished colour image. Colour adds a dimension when I want it, and plenty of frames are worth keeping without it.
What I point it at
Nebulae through narrowband and filtered monochrome imaging. Wide fields and star trails that show a whole night’s rotation. Aurora, when Alberta obliges. The Moon and planets through more immediate visual and camera setups. And the deep-sky objects where careful tracking and long integration turn into visible structure.
Related projects
- Starparty plans observing sessions and keeps the field log.
- Skyfence measures the real horizon around an observing site.
- All Night Sky explores what is above the horizon.
- My broader photography hobby covers the daylight archive.