SPAAAAACE

I've been dabbling with astrophotography off-and-on for a year or so. These are some of my better pictures, though there's definitely room for improvement.

This is the Orion nebula, one of the brightest deep sky objects there is.

Fun fact: The vast majority of photographs (modern ones, anyway) of celestial objects are not, in fact, single photos. They're the result of algorithmically combining, or "stacking," dozens or hundreds of images along with various calibration frames to produce a single high-quality image.

This image is the result of stacking 60, 10 second exposures, then editing the result in Luminar 4 and cropping down.

Here we have the Andromeda galaxy. This was 180, 30 second exposures. Andromeda is big (bigger than the moon), but not very bright.

Long exposures require a mechanism to track your lens or telescope across sky as the Earth rotates, else whatever you're shooting gets smeared across the image. 30 seconds is about the limit of what my star tracker can do with my telescope before trails and smearing become noticeable.

I have a bigger telescope, a full-on computerized go-to equatorial mount, and various odds and ends on order, but most things are backordered forever. Who knows when it will all turn up. It will really open up what I can do when it does show up, though.

This is a simple, single photograph of the NEOWISE comet from last year. I could only just barely make out the comet with my eyes when I took this, but my camera had no trouble picking it up.

So yeah. Art?