You definitely want to click for the full version

NGC 7814, or "the mini sombrero" is a spiral galaxy located approximately 40 million light years away seen edge-on from earth. Hidden between the foreground stars - stars that are part of our own milky way galaxy - many distant background galaxies can be spotted; pretty much everything that is not quite round and sharp is in fact not a star but an entire galaxy maybe hundreds of light years away, and each made up of many millions of their own stars (an planets).

Close to the mini sombrero galaxy, a very faint line can be seen. This is actually more of a point-like object that was moving during all exposures, essentially drawing a line in the image. It's an asteroid, part of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The minor planet has the designation (79568) 1998 QS85, and it was almost in opposition, meaning that seen from earth, the asteroid is opposite from the Sun. It's not many millions of light years away, instead the photons the camera caught, left the asteroid only 10 minutes earlier.

The image was made with a 16" Dobson F/5 telescope on an EQ platform, with an ASI1600MM-Cool camera. In total about 4000 exposures of 1 second each were created, of which the best 3000 were combined and post-processed to create this image.

M64 under poor conditions (not so good seeing + lots of wind causing quite a bit of movement in the frames).

I ended up using about 2600 frames of 1 second exposure each.

full version

The pretty planetary nebula NGC 1501 is approximately 4200 light years away. About 10 thousand times closer by then the galaxy I imaged at the same night, but about 50 million times further out than Jupiter I often image as well....just to put things into perspective a bit ...

The image shows the remains of a dying red giant star, and is actually a combination of two sets of several thousands of images taken with the Pt Grey Blackfly (imx249) and ASI224MC (imx224) cameras used for luminance (detail) and color data respectively. The color camera has a smaller field of view, so I could only apply the color data on part of the image, which is why only a small section around the nebula shows any color.

full version

Whirlpool galaxy with the ASI174MM (luminance, no filters used) and some color information added with the ASI224 color camera (new, extremely low read noise with only 0.75e!). The FOV with the ASI224 is much smaller, so I didn't get color everywhere. I also only were able to use 1 second exposures, because there was a LOT of wind messing with the tracking of the Dobson on EQ platform. I will definately try to improve this image later with better color shots AND perhaps also more luminance data (IF seeing is good).

I recently (September 2015) reprocessed the luminance channel using a new technique in AS!2 that removes the remaining horizontal noise of the 174 sensor. This allows me to push the data further quite a bit. I would also like to get some new color data to go along with this image, something that matches better with the details that can be seen in the luminance frame.

This image is a combination of about 1800 recordings of 1 second exposure each. It shows supernova sn2011b in the galaxy NGC2655.

I added some color data to this image.

The new icx414aq modded webcam was used in nonraw color-mode. In total about 26 color images of 30 seconds exposure were stacked using my own stacking program. The color data was not taken in prime focus, but a cheap 0.7x focal reducer was used. Details about the luminance data can be found in the link above.

The luminance and color images were combined and processed in Photoshop.

I added some color data to this image.

The new icx414aq modded webcam was used in nonraw color-mode. In total about 51 color images of 15 seconds exposure were stacked using my own stacking program. The color data was not taken in prime focus, but a cheap 0.7x focal reducer was used. Details about the luminance data can be found in the link above.

The luminance and color images were combined and processed in Photoshop.

Conditions during imaging were far from perfect. There was some wind present which made the stars look like little stripes instead of round. Transparancy and seeing were also not very good.
In total I used 238 images of 10 seconds exposure each to get this final image.

The images were manually selected, and stacked using my own experimental stacking program, which seems to work pretty nice. The stack was then processed in Photoshop and Iris to enhance some detail, and fix most of the not so round stars.

NGC 2976 is a relatively small member of the M81 group. It is a spiral galaxy, but the spiral arms are very difficult to see. Its distance is estimated to be around 12 million light years.

This image is a stack of 98 frames of 15 seconds exposure each.

My best shot of M51 so far. In total I selected the best 200 frames out of 591 using my own experimental stacking program. The exposure time of each frames was 10 seconds.

The final stack was further processed in Photoshop CS4 and Iris.