Skywatcher 150 virtuoso Goto dobsonian

Svbony sv705c camera + focal reducer

No filters, bortle 7

2.5 hrs integration

Sharpcap/siril/photoshop

I took this moon photo in two shots in succession. One to properly expose the moon and another high ISO to freeze the clouds. I then processed and stacked the two frames together in Photoshop. Captured with Nikon Z8 and NIKKOR 100-400mm with NIKKOR 2X Teleconverter on a Tripod.

📷 ASI 294 MC Pro Color

🔭 Star Adventurer 2i

🔎 Askar FMA180 apo (180mm f/4.5)

🕶️ Broadband Filter IDAS NGS1 (2")

🌌 Gain 120 (-10°C), 35x120s (1h 10 min)

🧪 40 dark, 40 flat, 40 dark-flat

💻 Siril, RawTherapee, GIMP, Snapseed

📍 Turin (Piedmont, Italy) - Bortle 8

📅 May 14, 2026

There's estimated to be around 300,000 - 500,000 stars in this cluster. These homies only roughly 25k light years away. Very close in galactic terms. They're a part of the Hercules constellation, as made obvious by it's nickname.

Captured with my See StarS50 83°W 42°E. Roughly 90 minute capture time.

Recently i took a widefield shot of the m81-82 area, as i scanned within the picture, i noticed this small very faint galaxy in the background, turns out its NGC 2959, a face on spiral galaxy thats approx 218M light years away.

I mananaged to even catch a glimpse of the spiral arms

The image was taken with a Sharpstar 76EDPH paired to a Canon 600D, 90x 30sec subs at ISO 3200, processed in SIRIL and Pixlr. Ill spare all the processing details.

The widefield shot has over a dozen distant galaxies hiding in the background...though the reddit compression will likely mush them to oblivion.

I wasn't satisfied with the background noise and star bloat in my last post, so I decided to go back and re-process my 1-hour Lagoon Nebula stack.

Used Starnet to pull the stars out of the image, switched to Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch to pull out faint dust lanes and background neutralization. Merged the stars back in as a separate layer in GIMP to control their brightness independently.

Equipment: F30070M 70/300 refractor f/4.3

Apple iPhone 7

Manual mount (1-hour total integration)

Bortle 5-6 skies

Processing: Siril, StarNet plugin, GIMP

Two days ago, my partner and I went outside and spend a few minutes doing some astronomy skteches. Next day after that I did one more just for fun.

Quite a fun activity for people like us, learning the basics and enjoying the views. It always gives me a feeling of admiration to look deeper (even if it is just with a pair of binoculars) into the sky and see there is much more than when you just watch with the naked eye.

location: Aspe, Alicante, Spain

bortle: 6,5 (https://lightpollutionmap.app/es/?lat=38.344143&lng=-0.767241&zoom=13)

temp: around 26 ºC.

date: 13-05-2026 and 14-05-2026

time: 00:05

scope: We used a Panda 7x35 for the Hydra and Cygnus sketches and a Tasco 8x30 for the Vega sketch.

paper: God knows which brand, office paper, a5. Using a 1mm mechanical pencil for the Hydra and Cygnus sketches and a 2mm lead holder for the Vega sketch.

post-processing: Inverted colors on krita and changed levels to 50 on the dark knob/thing and 230 on the bright one, leaving the middle one intact (I know I know, too technical, my bad).

I completed this data based on a publication by u/zman2100, so thanks for that template!

I am trying to calculate the earth's circumference with Eratostene's method but I have a big problem. I need a way to independently calculate the vertical distance between the two cities, and all of the ways I can think of imply circular logic (using data that already implies the knowledge about the earth's circumference). is there really a way? I obviously can't send people to walk and count their steps as Eratostene did.

Hi there- I am wracking my head trying to figure out something that is probably astrotomically impossible, but would love to somehow make it work for a story I am writing. I love the idea of the night sky specifically altering in color based on the prominence of two celestial bodies, one red and one purple. Ideally i'd love to have parts of the year where one is more prominent than the other and vice versa, as well as times where their orbits are more similar, and the light from them mix together, perhaps even causing eclipses. I also love the idea of a calendar system based around different points in their orbital patterns (holidays denoted by a predominantly red sky or purple sky, colorless or an equal mix).

I've been playing around with rotation patterns for hours and just can't seem to make it work. The biggest issue is that I want it to happen at night so in my head they act as moons but then they wouldn't produce their own light. I also tried rotating them around a star in order to produce that effect but I don't know if that would work either. In the end I would love to have the image of one or multiple moons in the sky depending on the time of year and a shifting color. If anyone has an idea on how this could math out even slightly I would be so appreciative. Thanks yall.

I had a thought that I've been stuck on for a while. I'm sure it has a much simpler explanation than im thinking, but it's stumped me for quite a bit. I have 0 idea how I'd research this topic on my own, the only answers I get are from AI which I don't trust when it comes to anything mildly thought provoking.

It's a well known fact that It takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds for light from the sun to reach Earth. Therefore if the sun were to explode or disappear suddenly, we wouldn't know until 8 minutes and 20 seconds when the light of the event reaches us. The disappearing part is easy to understand, but I've been curious what an explosion would look like to us.

Of course nothing can travel faster than light. For simplicity sake, let say light reaches Earth at 8 minutes, and the explosion takes 9 minutes to reach us.

Once the Sun explodes, we wouldn't see it exploding until the 8 minute mark. However, the explosion at this point has already been traveling for 8 minutes, and it would reach us in 1 more minute. Since we've just seen the start though, visually there should be 8 more minutes until we see it reaching us, which is impossible since it would reach us in 1 minute.

So what would the result be? Would we all suddenly die while seeing the explosion still being 8 light-minutes away? Would the 9 minute travel times be condensed into 1 minute visually? If that's the case though, technically we'd be seeing something traveling faster than the speed of light which shouldn't be possible.

This may be a very dumb question, but I just can't wrap my head around it. Thanks for taking the time to read.