I couldn’t agree more, thank you for sharing so much information!

We were in exactly the same situation and bought a Fuji camera. We are very happy with our decision as we can shoot both ‘normal’ photography with the feeling of a nice camera body and astrophotography on a beginner level.

The results we got so far exceeded our expectations by far, we posted some of our images here in this sub or here in full resolution .

One thing to keep in mind is that normal cameras block most of the infrared light, which makes it unsuitable for shooting hydrogen nebulae. That’s a minor reason why we eventually chose a Fuji camera, as they filter a bit less infrared than other brands.

In the end the biggest impact makes the lens/telescope. After a lot of research we chose the Samyang/ Rokinon 135mm f2.0 lens. Also we found it very rewarding shooting with such a ‘small’ focal length because it forgives minor inaccuracies while giving very good results.

For us the biggest reasons for this hobby are to experience the night sky with our own equipment and learning very much (about physics, processing the data, cameras, …). Both things can be achieved with modest equipment and I would keep that in mind when comparing own images with others. Also I personally love the challenge to get the best possible results with things you already have.

Hope that helped a bit.

Also this is a 3d animation of our setup used to shoot this image:

Very interesting, thank you for sharing. Your linked gif makes it very apparent that it was indeed a satellite.

I also searched in Stellarium and found a decommissioned military satellite called STSS Demo 2 that fits the path and time stamp perfectly.

-9 magnitude is insane, must’ve been a very cool sight.

Thank you!

Ha, thanks for letting me know. I didn’t know satellites can create flares like this. As all the other satellites were so dim I assumed it had to be something different.

For editing I chose the single sub with the flare and screen blended it in photoshop.

Beautiful, thanks for sharing!

Thanks!

Yes processing the image plays a huge role.

But at the end you can only work with the information provided by your equipment as there are physical limitations on what one can capture.

To me the most interesting part of this hobby is to learn what you physically really have to do to get good images. Physics not only plays a role on understanding what we see in these images but also on how to make them.

Truly fascinating!

While there are tools like generative AI models to invent images like this, in astrophotography it is very important only to use tools which don‘t invent any new information.

The only tool which is debatable is denoising with AI, as it really creates information learned from other images. But even here there are ways to prevent this.

Imo at the end we want to capture whats really out there, not what there could be

I mean, I literally just put the phone on the roof of my car and leaned it against my wallet. It was just an experiment because I wanted to know whats possible with just a phone

Ha thanks, didn’t expect such nice comments for such a bad image. Yes I also was blown away that the nebula is barely noticeable, even with smartphones strong IR filters

Yes, I used Siril for stacking/ stretching, Starnett++ for star removal (to edit the glimpse of orion nebula a little better), GraXpert for gradient and noise, and BlurXTerminator for deconvolution. Final editing was done in Photoshop.

So heavy editing indeed…

Very special diffraction lens used…

Beautiful!

Thanks!

Thank you!

No not really, but I choose it because I didn’t know what the precision of the tracker was as I never used one before. But as I know now with only 135mm focal length I can use well above one minute.

Using a longer exposure time is normally preferred because you don’t get so much images to process. But as always there are exceptions (lucky imaging, comet shooting, more precise work needed -> polar alignment)

Thank you very much for responding!

Wow this looks amazing. If you don‘t mind I have some questions… I assume this was shot with an Ha filter to reveal the structure on the surface, otherwise it would be all white? Also what is the need of 10% of the images? Do you stack them? One exposure should have enough signal shouldn’t it? And last but not least what focal length does your telescope have?