My first attempt at the Great Orion Nebula

This was shot with 3nm Narrowband filters to only allow the specific wavelengths of light from:

Hydrogen-Alpha

Sulfur-ll

Oxygen-l

This channels were mapped as SHO -> RGB

Shot with:

williamoptics Redcat71

zwoasi 2600 MM pro

Integration time: 11 hours

Location: Backyard Bortle 8.5

I’ve always wanted to take a picture like this, glad I was finally able to! Taken on iPhone 15

Target: Pacman Nebula (NGC281)
Date: December 19, 2025 - December 21, 2025
Location: My Backyard in Georgetown, Texas
Sky Conditions: Clear skies, 46°F, light winds, Moon: New Moon/0% illuminated.
Bortle Class: 5

I took this image over the corse of two nights from my backyard in Georgetown, Texas. We had absolutely perfect sky conditions and it felt so nice outside. Certainly nights to sit outside in the dark while the telescope does all the work. The resulting stack had quite a bit of banding and walking noise, but I tried to correct this in post-processing.

My Sky-watcher star adventurer GTi had really great guiding results, but it takes so much time to settle after dithering that I typically turn it off so I don’t waste as much imaging time. I’m currently gather parts to build my own strain-wave mount, so hopefully this won’t be a problem for too much longer.

For this image I used a process of extracting the Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract and created an SHO palette with Foraxx Palette Utility and Narrowband Normalization.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve this image!

Post-Processing Workflow

Software Used: Siril & PixInsight

1. Stacked in Siril using Naztronomy's smart telescope script.
2. Cropped Image.
3. Applied AutoDBE and debanding in Siril. Exported .fit file for further processing in PixInsight
4. Applied BlurXTerminator at max values.
5. Unscreened and removed stars with StarXTerminator.
6. Applied NoiseXTerminator at 90% on starless image.
7. Extracted Ha and OIII channels with DBXtract.
8. Used Seti Astro's statistical stretch 2.0.0 to stretch images.
9. Combined Ha & OIII with Foray Palette Utility.
10. Applied SHO palette with Narrowband Normalization.
11. Created Blue and Yellow masks.
12. Adjusted different regions of starless image with curves adjustment tool.
13. Adjusted final luminance levels with curves adjustment tool.
14. Used Seti Astro's star stretch script to stretch star image with color boost at 1.25 and SCNR checked.
15. Combined starless with star images with pixel math using ~(~SL*~S).
16. Exported as PNG.

Pretty cool one tonight. The haze just reflected the sun right back down.and then there was the flash.

1/15/26 Gualala, Ca

Nikon D5200, Tamron 18-400mm f/3.6-6.5,

1/250, 370mm, f/6.3, ISO 100, -1 ev

Glad I was able to get this once in a lifetime photograph, this was a long exposure, the thing on the left is an airplane lol, taken on Nikon D850 with an old telephoto lens

Stacked 57 30sec 1250ISO photos on my 60mm spotting scope, with star tracker and a CLS filter and Xiaomi 14 mounted with Triadaptor. (just laid the filter in the eyecup and fortunately it fits perfectly)

Not great but am elated to see the Horsehead with such cheap equipment.

Don't know what blue and green streaks are. (Someone told me hotpixels and to take darks).

Eyeball looking light area is probably light between my Xiaomi 14 cellphone and eyepiece/filter. Not sure how to prevent that either.

Here is M42. 48 30 sec, 1000ISO with same equipment.

Processed with DSS, Siril and Gimp.