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!