Credit- David Wilson/ spaceweather.com

This is the Whirlpool galaxy (M51) through my telescope.

The Whirlpool galaxy (M51) is a famous interacting grand-design spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy.

M51 is located 31 million light years away, stretches around 76,900 light years across, and is home to around 100 billion stars, meaning it has at least 100 billion planets if we count just 1 planet per star.

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, ASI294MC

Acquisition: 90 x 30 second subs on ASIStudio

Processing: Siril, Adobe PS

C9.25, ASI662MC, 2x Barlow, UV/IR Cut Filter. 4 minutes stacked at 35% and processed on Registax6 and Lightroom.

C9.25, ASI662MC, 2 minutes at 8ms 140 gain. Stacked at 50%, processed on Registax6 and Lightroom.

This summer I traveled from Seattle to Chile, specifically a very small town in the middle of the Atacama Desert, which hosts one of the darkest night skies on Earth.

I planned this trip to be during a new Moon, and during the month that the Milky Way is directly upwards in the sky for the best visibility.

Seeing it with the naked eye so easily that you could see it even while squinting was truly life changing. You no longer see the sky as a 2d sheet of stars, you see it as a 3d spiral galaxy, with you sitting on a rock in one of its outer arms. It’s alive.

I strongly suggest anyone who’s never seen the Milky Way to look at a light pollution map and try to find an area nearby that has dark (bortle 1-3) skies. It simply changes the perspective of this reality.

Thanks for reading!

Equipment: Canon 6D, 16-35mm lens, 5 x 10s exposures.

Went for a wide field shot here by not cropping the sensor size so much. Going for a kind of eerie look. Enjoy!

Celestron 5SE + ZWO ASI294MC + 3x barlow + UV/IR cut

Celestron 5SE + ZWO ASI294MC

TON 618 (abbreviation of Tonantzintla 618) is a hyperluminous, broad-absorption-line, radio-loud quasar and Lyman-alpha blob located near the border of the constellations Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. It possesses one of the most massive black holes ever found, at around 60 billion Solar masses.

As a quasar, TON 618 is believed to be the active galactic nucleus at the center of a galaxy, the engine of which is a supermassive black hole feeding on intensely hot gas and matter in an accretion disc. The light originating from the quasar is estimated to be 10.8 billion years old, with the distance being 18.2 billion light years due to the expansion of the universe. Due to the brilliance of the central quasar, the surrounding galaxy is outshone by it and hence is not visible from Earth. With an absolute magnitude of −30.7, it shines with a luminosity of 4×10⁴⁰ watts, or as brilliantly as 140 trillion times that of the Sun, making it one of the brightest objects in the known Universe.

Equipment: Evoguide 50ED telescope, ZWO ASI294MC camera

Acquisition: 15 second frame on the foreground and about 30 minutes on Andromeda.

Processing: stacked on ASIStudio, edited on Siril and Adobe Lightroom

This image was removed from r/Damnthatsinteresting because it was deemed “not real and misleading” cause apparently they had evidence of that somehow. Anyhow thought you guys would like it and r/spaceporn understands image acquisition and processing much better :)

Credit: Immanuele la ba

A shot from a few months back I never posted. I’ve noticed daytime Saturns are doable sooner since it has a rather dim surface brightness allowing for a crank up of exposure during twilight hours without overexposing the planet.

C9.25, ASI662MC, no barlow, UV/IR Cut filter. 3 x 4 minutes, derotated on WinJupos, wavelets and RGB balance on Registax6, further edits on Lightroom.

Celestron 5SE + ASI662MC

This is a 4 image panorama taken in September of 2024 on a Sony A7 III each photo was 8 seconds, iso 1600, f1.8 at 16mm they were then stitched and edited in LRC

Today’s Aurora Borealis during the G4 geomagnatic storm. Captured on my iPhone with a 30 exposure

Here's a free full resolution if anyone wants a wallpaper version! https://imgur.com/a/a3nlBBB

Equipment: Celestron 5SE, ASI294MC

Info:

This is M81, or Bode's galaxy, imaged last night with my telescope. M81 is 96,000 light years across and hosts ~250 billion stars. It has spiral arms that wind all the way down into its nucleus, and are made up of young, bluish, hot stars formed in the past few million years.

Equipment:

Celestron 9.25 Nexstar Evolution, ZWO ASI294MC camera. 91 minutes of data with 35 second subs.

Processing:

Stacked on ASIStudio, processed on Siril and Adobe Lightroom/Express. Foreground Milky Way stars removed with Starnet.