It's good to have you here :-)

It really depends on your camera -- the 174-mini comes to focus in the eyepiece holder 🙂

Total of 10.5 hours of exposure:

42 x 300s Sii
42 x 300s Ha
42 x 300s Oiii

Taken using an Altair 26M Pro TEC Camera through a Vixen AX103S Telescope with Vixen 0.7x Flattener and Antlia filters (36mm 3.5nm Ha and Sii, 36mm 3nm Pro Oiii). Captured using N.I.N.A. nighttime-imaging.eu

This is a "false colour” image representing emissions of ionised gasses Hydrogen Alpha (Ha), Oxygen 3 (Oiii) and Sulphur 2 (Sii), mapped to RGB using the “hubble palette” but tuned to increase the contrast between the channels.

Taken from Light Polluted London (bortle class 8, SQM 18.45).

A trick I use to point a DSLR (assuming you know the sky "manually") is to point a Green laser pointer at the thing you want to image. The laser appears brightly in the DSLR live view and you can use that to frame your image even if no stars are visible! A more advanced option is plate solving...

You can actually do a lot by just stacking shorter exposures, especially in your skies! The background image on my website astrophotos.uk is a bunch of 12 second exposures on a static tripod, taken in the mountains somewhere in Vermont. Wide angle and rule of 500 let you take great images untracked.

Software:

N.I.N.A. -- Capturing
PHD2 -- Guiding
ASTAP -- Plate Solving
EzSuite — LiveStacking and Calibration
PixInsight — Stacking and Processing
Affinity Photo — Collage and Tweaks

Hardware:

Altair 26M Pro TEC Camera
Vixen AX103S Telescope
Vixen 0.7x Flattener for AX103S
Pegasus Falcon Rotator
ZWO EFW3 Filter Wheel
Antlia 36mm 3.5nm SHO Filters
DeepSkyDad AF3 Autofocuser
SkyWatcher HEQ5 Mount
SkyWatcher Evoguide Guide Scope
Altair 290M Guide Camera

Yes, yes you did. As for old, just think how old the universe is and it’s doing just fine…

Thank you!

What’s really needed imho is for the Bluesky team to enable in-app control of a curated feed like yours, such that people can apply in the app and you can add them here directly. It seems like such a logical thing to add…

Rather than "I can reuse it for other fellowships" aren't you meant to be thinking positive with "I'll never need to apply again because I'm totally going to get this one!"? 😀

Does this post show up in the feed?

If it helps, the gmail account I used to log in to signup.astronomy.blue was: szymon (at) kapadia (dot) pl

bsky.app/profile/astr...

As an aside @emily.space it was your great article emilydoesastro.com/posts/230824... which pointed me to the idea of changing my handle to my domain name, so it's your own fault that this happened! 😂

No problem! Erm…good question :-) I think it was simon_szymon (with the default domain, something like bsky.social I think?). Hope that’s enough to find it!

@emily.space not sure if I’m doing this right — did you see the above message ? :-)

Hi there. New to bsky. I signed up to post to the feed, but then I changed my 'handle' to be my domain name, and suddenly realised that means you won't find my original handle when processing applications. Could you add me to the astronomy feed please? Many thanks! :-)