Elysium Skies

04/10/2025

Thought i would have a play with the latest Siril beta program and scripts as i haven't processed anything in a while.
This was the original final image of the Running chicken nebula image i took last year.
Ran through Sirils hdr script, it did squeeze some extra details out.
I dropped the orange saturation too as it was a little high.
Hope it looks a bit better as i am quite rusty at processing now 🙂

18/08/2024

Please check this out.
Some excellent astro images by my mate Bill in California 😎🤘

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03/06/2024

Another redo of old data.
IC 434 Otherwise known as The Horsehead Nebula from november 2021.
A small dark nebula in the constellation of Orion the Hunter.
IC 434 is 1,375 light years distant
4 hours 30 minutes of 2 minute unguided images taken with an 80mm refractor telescope.
Stacked in Deep sky stacker
processed in graxpert, siril and PS
Included a cropped close up

30/05/2024

Another horrible day so another re process of old data from mid 2021.
This is NGC 6960 Commonly referred to as The Witches Broom nebula.
It is part of what's know as the Cygnus Loop, the remains of a supernova explosion 2400 light years away.
Taken with my Skywatcher ED80 telescope and L-extreme filter
4 hours of 2 minute unguided images.
Definitely brought out some more details on this redo.

29/05/2024

A redo of old data as the weather here is awful.
The Rosette nebula (sh2-275) a bright emission nebula in the constellation of Monoceros.
At the center is the star cluster NGC 2244
Just 50 minutes of 2 minute unguided frames taken in 2022.
Equipment;
ED 80 telescope with optolong L-extreme filter and ZWO 533 mc pro camera.
Redone in Graxpert, Siril and PS

21/05/2024

An update on the last image of NGC 6188, The Fighting Dragons of Ara.
I dug out another 6 hours of image data i took two years ago and added it to the ones i aquired this year.
A total of 23 hours and 15 minutes.
I sub divided the image into quarters to try to show some of the details as the Face book image algorithm crushes images down to crap.
Taken with only an 80mm diameter {3 1/2 inch) telescope and a narrowband filter from suburban Perth.

18/05/2024

I manage to add more data to my Fighting Dragons of Ara image.
A total of just under 17 and a quarter hours of subs ranging from 3 to 10 minutes.
Same set up equipment wise as April.
This is my initial processing of the stack, I will have another play around with it and see if I can pull more details out tomorrow.
Hope you like it 😊👍

10/05/2024

This is NGC 2359 more commonly referred to as Thors Helmet.
This 30 lightyear across emmision nebula is in the constellation of Canis Major (the large dog) and is about 15,000 light years from Earth.
The dome shape of Thors Helmet is created by the very large, bright star at the centre pushing the interstellar gas and dust away from it. This star is a type known as a Wolf-Rayet star and may go supernova in the ‘near’ astronomical future.
This is a re processing of old data from December 2001 taken with my 80mm Skywatcher refractor and dual narrowband filter.
A mix of sub images ranging from 120 seconds to 240 seconds with at total integration time of just 3 hours and 20 minutes, all unguided from my light polluted garden in Perth.
Reprocessed in Deep sky stacker, Graxpert, PS and Astrosharp
Updated this image after a little tweak

08/05/2024

Although this doesn’t look like much, it’s a big deal for me as I have wanted to see one of these since i was a kid.
This is a Type II Supernova explosion designated SN/2024ggi and it exploded 22 million years ago in the Southern Cross Galaxy NGC 3621 in the constellation of Hydra.
For a brief period it outshines the entire home Galaxy but because of the huge distance we are only now seeing it.
Every other star in this image is in our own milky way galaxy.
To put things into perspective the Hiroshima bomb was the equivalent of 15,000 tonnes of high explosive, this titanic explosion was around 1028 mega-tons.
This explosion kicks back and gravity compresses the stars core into an ultra dense object called a neutron star that is onlyabout 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) across.
Matter is so compressed by gravity that one sugar cube of neutron star material would weigh about 1 trillion kilograms (or 1 billion tons) on Earth

29/04/2024

In post processing of the stacked images i take i use a program that separates the stars from the nebula.
The resulting images of stars and nebulae can then be worked on independently to get the results i am after.
The starless files can look quite cool on there own, so here are some of my latest images with stars removed.
Hope you like them :)