You’d really just need a planetary camera, all sky lens, and some enclosure for it. Def recommend checking out these videos:

https://youtu.be/mUAbvHXXRJo

https://youtu.be/2ih_25_wY30

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just braced my phone against the eyepiece with my hands. I think also the scope is nowhere near the weight limit for the tripod so it’s just pretty sturdy naturally

Honestly just seeing shadows look sharp was a weird experience too

I’ve been in 2 eclipses, and even fully knowing what was going to happen, the dumb lizard part of my brain was freaking out a little because the sun just disappeared at 2pm. It’s a wild experience

CMOS, technically. It’s the ASI1600mm-pro

Edge of the frame. Since stars are point sources of light any distortion from the optics, trailing from a long exposure, or even the atmosphere will distort them. IMO the center stars are what I’d consider acceptable for an untracked image, but then again I don’t really do much widefield astrophotography. It could also be your camera shifted slightly or from walking around near it?

There’s a number of YouTube channels of varying quality/expertise that are good for beginners, like AstroBackyard, Alaskan astro, cuiv the lazy geek to name a few. The cloudynights forum should If your a discord person, we do have one for this community (.gg/astrophotography) that’s pretty active with a lot of info that’s been gathered over the years, and it’s where I’ve learned most of what I know about the hobby.

Looks great for a first shot! If you took a couple more exposures you could stack them and use dark frames to help with the hot pixels. Also if you ever get a star tracker you could stop the lens down slightly to help with the distorted stars on the edges, but overall it looks pretty decent

How long of an exposure was this?

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:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

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

No hobby is safe

Essentially every stacking program have options to reject outlier pixels, such as the satellites. Hell even just averaging the pixels in an image stack without the outlier rejection would greatly diminish the streaks.

deleted by creator

Kinda vibes at this point, but on my broadband images I’ll loop through something like LLLLRRGGBB in my sequence. main thing is making sure there’s good enough signal in the final luminance image. Seeing the SNR plots while live stacking is also very helpful for knowing when I hit diminishing returns for a particular filter

So I originally shot this back in 2020 from my in-law’s house in a Bortle 4 area. Only got a handful of LRGB subs because my guide cam did not wanna talk to my laptop for most of the session back then. Recently I decided to shoot some Ha from my B9 apartment and give it a reprocess in HaLRGB. Overall I’m very pleased with this improvement after 6 years! Captured captured in February 2020 and December 2025 from bortle 4 and 9, respectively.

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: 9 hours 55 minutes (Camera at unity gain, -15°C)

• Ha - 48x600"

• L - 12x300"

• R - 4x300"

• G - 4x300"

• B - 3x300"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction

duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (math courtesy of /u/jimmythechicken1)

$T * med(model) / model

Luminance linear:

• BlurXterminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

Ha Processing:

• StarX to remove stars

• Subtracted red continuum to create a ‘clean’ Ha image using pixelmath

• Pixelmath to combine the clean Ha image into the RGB image

largely following this advanced narrowband combination guide, also made by jimmy

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• StarX to remove stars (to be used for star addition later)

• PixelMath per the advanced narrowband guide to add Ha into the red and blue channels

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Stars only image:

• BlurXterminator for discortion correction and some mild star reduction

• HSV repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear (less aggressive stretch)

• Slight curve adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

• More curves

• LocalHistogramTransformation

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• NoiseXTerminator for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

• Resample to 70%

• DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy (not a whole lot going on in the background)

• Annotation

Finally going through my processing backlog! I tried to get some Ha on this from home, but I had too many obstructions to shoot at this declination. Decided to keep this as a wider crop since most the images of this I see are cropped in on just the nebula itself. Captured captured on November 23rd, 2025 from a Bortle 3 zone (deerlick astronomy village).

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: 10 hours 12 minutes (Camera at unity gain, -15°C)

• L - 97x180"

• R - 37x180"

• G - 36x180"

• B - 34x180"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

The luminance data was split into 3 stacks and combined to use the single channel DeepSNR method

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

Luminance linear:

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection using MARS Project data

• BlurXterminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)

• STF applied via HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• MultiscaleGradientCorrection

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• BlurX (correct only mode)

• StarX to remove stars (to be used for star addition later)

• StarX to extract a stars only image

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Stars only image:

• HSV repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear (less aggressive stretch)

• Slight curve adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

• More curves

• NoiseXTerminator for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

• LocalHistogramTransformation

• Even more curves

• ColorSaturation adjustments (get rid of some background greens)

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here)

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• Resample to 60%

• Annotation

What did you use to capture/process this?

Siril should be able to. I’ll admit I’ve never used it myself (I use pixinsight for all my processing), but I know it’s a fairly popular free processing option. Also you’ll definitely want to try and take more dark frames than just one. Generally you’ll stack the darks together, and then subtract that from your lights (this should remove most of the noise thats not the fixed hot pixels)

That seems like a fairly typical amount to me (certainly a lot less than my old canon 600d)

Hot pixels! Best way to deal with them is taking dark frames: a bunch of exposures with the exact same settings as your light/main frames, but with the lens cap on so it just captures the noise. Also important that your camera is roughly the same temperature as when you took the light frames, since this type of noise is very temperature dependent. Once you have your dark frames, you can stack them to make a master dark, and use this to subtract the hot pixels from your lights using a deep sky stacking program of your choice.

Side note: for most consumer cameras, using a higher ISO will actually lower noise, at the cost of dynamic range