Zi7ar21's Astrophotography Gallery

This page hosts a collection of astrophotos I've taken. Click on any of the links below the images to open a high-resolution AVIF in a new tab. This isn't a complete collection of astrophotographs I've taken, so be sure to check my AstroBin and Instagram for more photos. This page is currently under heavy construction!

NGC 281: The 'Pacman Nebula'

Photograph of NGC 281 The 'Pacman Nebula'

Click here to open an AVIF (9687285 B, 5000x3300) in a new tab.

NGC 281: The 'Pacman Nebula', along with IC 59 and IC 63 (a pair of reflection and emission nebulae), all of which are deep-sky objects in the Cassiopeia constellation.

I shot over 549 frames totalling over ~14.2 GB of data, and stacked the best 90% of light frames for a total of 494 30-second exposures, or 4 hours and 7 minutes.

Gear Used

Samyang 135mm F2.0 ED UMC @ f/2
Canon EOS Rebel T6 w/ Magic Lantern @ ISO 800, 30-second exposures
Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer

Shot from my Bortle 5 backyard with 92% Moon illumination! No flat frames! (They went terribly wrong and I ended up not using them). You may also notice rain noise, I dithered for the first hour or so of data but soon got tired of running out into 27℉ weather.

Software Used

Siril for stacking (Even though the data was only 14.2 GB, Siril wanted ~400 GB of free disk space while I only had ~100 GB available on my SSD so I split the data into 3 groups and stacked the best 90% of each, or a FWHM better than ~3.4 px) and photometric color calibration
GIMP and G'MIC for background extraction (I could not for the life of me get Siril background extraction to remove the wierd artifacts since I didn't use flats, so I used a good ol' method known as "erode, blur, and subtract" where you quite literally create a flat by applying erode, blurring, and then subtracting)

If it's a little underwhelming, it's because my camera is unmodded. At least you can still see the little bit of dust at the center of NGC 281, and the stars are colorful!

Astrograde

Zi7ar21