Fishnets, I love the fishnets. Ties the outfit all together.

I only deal with KEH.com. I've been burned on eBay and here, and have decided not to screw with anything else. I have found their quotes to be realistic, and you get paid quickly.

Ues Lightroom and Photoshop?

Place a graduated filter on the foreground and fiddle with shadows and highlights to bring out some detail.
Find the image(s) with the aircraft and remove them from the sequence.
Try opening the images as layers in Photoshop, do an Auto Align, then an Auto Blend. With 240 exposures, you should be able to get complete circles out of the star trails.

I've also had tremendous luck with StarStax, a free specialized star trail application.
You can also find numerous YouTube tutorials on star trails.

No, I used a Light Pollution filter, and the image came out this way. Next chance I will do an imaging session with a narrowband filter and combine the data.

This is the first chance in a few weeks to do astrophotography. The moon was at 50% on my target's opposite side of the sky. I took 45 ea 3-minute exposures with my RedCat51 telescope and ASI533 cooled color camera with a light pollution filter to make it possible from Los Angeles.

Messier 33 is 2.75 million light years from the Milky Way and is part of the local group of galaxies, like our next-door neighbor.

Processed in Pixinsight, then heavily worked in Lightroom to make it presentable. N ext time, I am going to use a narrowband filter to see if I can resolve any Ha areas in the spiral arms.

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This is the first chance in a few weeks to do astrophotography. The moon was at 50% on my target's opposite side of the sky. I took 45 ea 3-minute exposures with my RedCat51 telescope and ASI533 cooled color camera with a light pollution filter to make it possible from Los Angeles.

Messier 33 is 2.75 million light years from the Milky Way and is part of the local group of galaxies.

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Never mind the flowers, the first shot is magnificent. Well done.

Composite of 34 images taken during the Eclipse in Albquequere last week.

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Thirty miles outside of Magdelena, New Mexico, is the Karl Jansky Very Large Array, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The plains of Augustin were chosen because of the isolation from interfering radio signals. There are 27 ea 82 feet movable parabolic antennas arranged in a "Y" shape, configurable for bandwidth.

Since I learned of its construction, this was one of my bucket list locations. Real science is done here. If you saw Contact or 2010, you've seen the antennas.

The site is gorgeous in color but made for infrared imaging.

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It was not very dark, the shadows were shorter, and the temperature dropped. But at the moment of totality, the light was not noticeably dim. I took my solar glasses off and was amazed that it was so bright out.

You're on vacation. The best cure is to leave the laptop behind. Relax, enjoy yourself.

The moment of totality for the Annular Eclipse in Albuquerque, NM. Shot with a Fuji XT4, Tamron 18-300 X lens at 200 mm with a specialized star tracker to keep the sun centered over the 2 hour eclipse. I was the only Fuji shooter on the field.

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IC63, The ghost of Cassiopeia, 550 light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. This is a very faint target; it took a lot of work to bring it out.

W.O. RedCat51
ASI 533 MC Pro camera
ASI 122 guide camera
Optolong L-Xtreme filter - could not image in Los Angeles without it.
Sky-Watcher EQM35 mount
ASI AIR Plus to rule them all.

50 ea 180 sec subs with darks from my library.
Stacking and processing in Pixinsight, finished image in Lightroom.

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I don't think astrophysicists know just where black holes form. Cygnus X1 is part of a binary star system where one component collapsed into a black hole.

IC63, The ghost of Cassiopeia, 550 light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. This is a very faint target; it took a lot of work to bring it out.

(Download)